[yata69420]

Probably because of https://basicattentiontoken.org/

For a group that's largely bet their fortunes on internet companies, it's kind of funny that anything crypto is so toxic here, but that's probably the reason.

The actual browser is under good technical stewardship from what I know. It's essentially not-evil Chrome with an optional crypto-for-ads monetization model, a crypto wallet, and some primitive default privacy and adblocking tools.

It suffers from the same technical deficiencies as Chrome (installing addons is harder than it should be, addon API is weak compared to firefox, Google controls the "store" for extensions), but I'd recommend it over any other Chromium-based browser.

[judge2020]

My particular gripe with BAT is noted here[0] and AFAIK nothing has changed; you still have to use their KYC-compliant platform to ever exchange BAT for real-world money, as they'd much rather you re-donate the BAT to websites via brave's reward system instead of ever exchanging for USD.

Other problems that they'd had:

- were inserting referral tokens into the URL when visiting popular websites, so presumably brave was getting a lot of referral credit[1]. In particular it seems to be bad-faith to inject referral codes since Brave really isn't driving traffic to these sites, unless when you type "crypto" it autocompletes "binance.us".

- They've since stopped doing this, but previously tipping BAT to a website or creator meant users would lose that BAT with it basically being held in escrow until the website/creator did their own KYC and redeemed the tokens.[2]

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27549826

1: https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/06/07/brave-browser-caugh...

2: https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2019/01/13/brave-web-br...

[augusto-moura]

You can still donate your BATs to institutions and websites (or should I say "pay for not having ads", at least this is what is being marketed for). I mostly contribute to wikipedia, as it is always in need of new donations and I like the idea of not having trackers/ads on it.

Edit: better wording

[Nursie]

Does Wikipedia still accept BAT?

Just interested, as they announced they were discontinuing cryptocurrency donations in general a short while ago.

[themerone]

Firefox has adopted the Chrome addon api. There are some difference, such as Chrome's changes that weaken adblockers are not being implemented.

The old (insecure) firefox extension api is long gone.