Brave taking cryptocurrency donations “for me” without my consent

My basic objection to the "opt-out" scheme is that my browser is effectively acting as a man-in-the-middle agent, confusing both the reader and the author, and co-opting any existing compensation or donation procedure.

For example, consider http://www.vim.org, which hosts the text editor Vim. The author, Bram Moolenaar, makes this editor freely-available, and asks that any donations be directed to ICCF Holand, a charity that serves the Kibaale Children's Center in Uganda.

The Brave browser, as it stands now, inserts itself in the middle of this established reader/contributor relationship and now claims that it'll take your donations and administer them on Bram's behalf. The user who falls for this scheme then sees what appears to be _additional_ requests for donations (the _actual_ request). _At a minimum_, this inserted message sows confusion where there once was none. In the worst case, money that would have gone to the ICCF is now held in escrow by Brave, and may or may not be delivered, and if so, will go to Bram directly rather than to the charity he hopes to support.

This is just one example of how the browser intercepting and modifying what you see is a truly bad design (intentional or not).

I use the Vim browser, and I want to support the project. Let me just grab the manual to gain a clear understanding of the terms and definitions the browser requires me to understand before I render said support according to the protocol we (reader and author) now find ourselves subject to. Oh Brave new world …

What is the difference between a “tip” and a “donation”?

Thanks for laying this out. Due to great posts like this and many others in this thread and on Twitter our eng. team is pushing up a bunch of changes tomorrow. You can read about them here: https://brave.com/rewards-update/

The bottom line is that it will be much much much clearer that unverified creators are not participating in Brave Rewards and what happens to any BAT tips a user tries to send to one. We'll also not be using any creative assets at all from unverified creators like their Youtube images. In the post we also commit to looking into whether to block attempts to tip unverified creators altogether.