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.

That sounds so clumsy that I suspect they really don't care / want folks to fail to collect.

Yeah I suspect this is part of their overall revenue model.

Honest question: Why do you suspect that? (I work at Brave. We're all very, very nerdy here. It'd be helpful to understand why a fellow nerd suspects we're up to no good.)

You invite users to donate to regularly purchase your cryptoassets whilst designing a dark pattern UX which indicates the cryptoassets are being distributed in a certain ratio amongst YouTubers and other content creators. Your website also falsely claims to be sending these assets to these content creators once a month and falsely claims that browser users can see how the assets have been distributed using this UX. In fact, only a small portion of the assets are actually distributed, and the browser user has no way of knowing whether their intended recipients receive anything.

Your investors are rewarded by the cryptoasset price rising from more people buying the tokens than selling them.

Do you honestly not see the problem here?

And that's even before we get into the TOC which explicitly permit you to confiscate funds not claimed within 90 days for growth marketing use....