| HN Mirror

How about instead you shut this off and rebuild it to be explicitly opt-in only?

Or, better for you personally: how about you hand in your resignation and retain an attorney?

Here's the thing: people who get away with this type of thing (sorry, "exciting and new crowdfunding option for creators", or whatever y'all prefer to call it) tend to get away with it only for as long as the targets of their "fundraising" are small-time creators who don't have the resources to pursue action against it. But sooner or later, even if only by accident, Brave's going to impersonate (sorry, "offer exciting crowdfunding options on behalf of") some entity that has resources, including lawyers, and it's going to end badly.

When that happens, a possible outcome is that they will suddenly "discover" all your statements on their behalf in this thread, and that's when it will end badly for you. Oh, that wasn't our position at all, oh, he wasn't authorized to speak like that on our behalf, oh, that's definitely not what we intended, we'll take action immediately to remedy that! The absolute best outcome of that for you is you get fired for cause. The worst outcomes involve you becoming the target of multiple legal actions.

I'm not an attorney and I'm not giving you legal advice. I will give you sincere personal advice: resign, hire an attorney. Find another job working somewhere that poses less of a threat to you.

As to why people will come after you, let me count the ways:

I know people who blog or create YouTube videos or whatever and are very careful not to monetize, because they're disabled and can't work but still need something to fill their days. But disability benefits are means-tested and income streams are constantly investigated. If a benefits agency decides that your scheme is providing income to a disabled person, congratulations! You just cut off their income, and they probably never even knew you existed. That's bad.

I have worked with several open-source projects that rely heavily on donations to keep going. They all have prominent things on their websites directing people where to go to donate, but you'd like to hijack that and instead send people to something the project doesn't know about and may not be able to collect on (especially given how often you flush the "donations" and how many hoops it seems people have to jump through, which many commenters have identified as something that makes them think this is a scam). Congratulations, you just took resources away from the project. And, for projects which use nonprofit foundations to manage fundraising, you just created tax issues -- what happens when the taxman doesn't believe the "we didn't know about them raising money for us" story?

And round and round and round we go. You're going to be hurting those people to make money. If you have a moral compass, it should be pointing heavily toward getting the hell out of there, as soon as you can.

Plus, crypto in general is in weird legal space to begin with. Lots of people can't afford to have you dealing in potentially unregistered securities in their names and without their knowledge or consent. In the US that could easily lead to federal felonies for them, because of what you did.

So, look. I've seen this pattern again and again and again. What Brave is doing is not a new idea. It's widely, roundly, solidly despised, both because it's an unwarranted intrusion on other people and because it creates such nebulous but frightening potential consequences for them. I've also been waiting for one of these crypto "fundraising" operations to finally go far enough that someone (either an entity with good lawyers, or a regulator) bothers to turn them into a smoking hole in the ground as an example to others. Maybe that's the ultimate fate of Brave; if it is, I won't shed any tears.