Brave taking cryptocurrency donations “for me” without my consent

I just dug up info on how Brave’s contributions thing works and it feels like such a mess.

According to https://brave.com/publishers/

- once you have accumulated $100 in contributions they email “the webmaster at your site” and the owner of your domain according to the WHOIS. I assume this is “webmaster@domain.name”, which I sure don’t have set up on my personal site.

- you have to “check your balance frequently and transfer funds wherever you choose”, which suggests that there’s no way to just say “send my my balance every month” and forget about it.

This whole model totally breaks down when you remember that there’s a ton of independent creators who don’t have their own sites, but instead post stuff on another site. Is Brave going to realize that I’m following this particular person on YouTube, that person on Tumblr, this other person on Deviantart, etc, etc? And are they going to ping them or are they just gonna tell the people who own the site?

The page where you sign up to receive payments (https://publishers.basicattentiontoken.org) makes it sound like they understand YouTube accounts and nothing else, and as a creator whos interest in pivoting to video is nonexistent, screw that, I’ll stick with Patreon and it’s opt-in model that just transfers money into my bank account every month as long as I have patrons.

My impression is that Brave's current model actively hurts small creators that would otherwise get some of that money sooner on the donation services they have signed up for, without waiting for Brave's $100 withdrawal threshold to be reached, if it ever does.

I'd be surprised if this will be deemed legal, once more people will find out that there is a company collecting donations in their name and without their consent.

Contacting creators as soon as they receive their first tip may help. Otherwise it just looks like they're capitalizing on our content and keep the long tail of donations indefinitely, while also making it less likely that we get contributions from Brave users on other payment platforms, since as far as they know, they are already supporting us through Brave.

>I'd be surprised if this will be deemed legal

I'm surprised how anyone could think this was a good idea, or even legal. What wouldn't surprise me is an incoming class action.

IANAL but I imagine that the donations are in brave tokens and it may or may not be treated as cash (even though the eventual payout is cash) which may or may not be legal depending on a lot of stuff that's beyond my area of expertise.

But if the idea was to 1) create token and 2) YOLO and yeah, lawsuits incoming.

But it could be that they have good lawyers and that it is actually legal (although as I write it I don't believe that, haha)