Repeating out of date information _per se_ and to ascribe malice is never justified, whatever you think of ads.
However, I think the idea that telling people you were going to be collecting money on behalf of someone, not letting them know, and just keeping it isn't likely to have been some small "whoopsie." Building a system to let people know didn't happen by accident. The $100 threshold wasn't an oversight. Not including visual differentiation between verified and unverified creators wasn't a slip-up. These had to have been purposeful and thought-out decisions.
I don't think the idea was to steal as much BAT as possible from would-be donors, it felt like a growth hack: you know, make it seem like Brave works everywhere, then one day when it is, we can all forget about the fake-it-till-you-make-it bit.
Which is normally fine, but people tend to get defensive about their money.
Further, comments, tweets, etc. generally are not the best way to communicate issues as complex as this, nor do I feel it the public’s job to clean up or go out of their way. You made a mess, you clean it up.
(You appears to be serial down voting; classy.)
Hacker news does not allow you to downvote responses to your comments. (Nor for that matter, can you tell who it was that downvoted you, so that accusation is unfounded.)
When someone does shady things in one area.. they probably do them in others.
It's got some competitors in this respect though. Namely Vivaldi and Edge.
Brave has all the Google integrations removed.
https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Deviations-from-...
EDIT: Appears Brave is even holding payments in escrow for parties that did not even sign up to receive payments, that’s not shady at all. Even makes me wonder what’s happening to all the funds in escrow.