To add to this, Brave appears to force you to use Uphold in order to "verify" your wallet. So this is absolutely Brave hiding your coins from you until you dox yourself with a third-party.

It's entirely possible to trade bat for many other coins on exchanges without KYC, but Brave forces you to be unable to do that (regardless of your local laws it seems?)

This is something Brave could easily fix by just exposing an API to allow you to do what you want with your BAT instead of forcing you to use a third party KYC service.

This is true. When you "receive" BAT in your browser, your browser is not a wallet. You can't send it to any address of your choice, or move it to an exchange that doesn't require KYC like Uniswap. The only place you can send that BAT you "received" is "verified creators" in the Brave ecosystem. It's much more like an IOU BAT than real BAT.

If you want to get real BAT that you could send to any address, send to Uniswap, or cash out, you must create an account on Uphold and complete full KYC before you can withdraw. That's when, invisibly, the IOU BAT becomes functional, cryptocurrency-like BAT.

It's like there are 2 BATs in reality despite the marketing. FakeBAT and RealBAT. FakeBAT only works within Brave's approved creators and is what you receive in your browser, and you can convert it to RealBAT which is on Ethereum and ERC20 compliant but only if you do KYC.

An addendum to my statement above: This also means, implicitly, BAT is not a private token. All BAT ultimately comes from people who completed KYC. This means that ultimately, if the government wanted to hunt down where someone's BAT came from, it's really easy when you've KYC'd the entire ecosystem.

And, you might be OK with that for what it is, and might not want money laundering. Fine, but don't advertise it to me as an extension of a privacy browser. This is perhaps the least private cryptocurrency ever outside of USDC.

Isn't this for legal reasons? I'm pretty sure my crypto exchange couldn't give less of a crap about my ID but due to anti-money laundering laws every exchange I've used has had to ask me for it.

This is the law; it's not Brave's design. Our design enables you to opt-in, earn, and give to content creators without having to provide any information. The law, however, requires and compels Brave to add KYC into the mix when you wish to self-fund or cash out. Anti-money laundering is not something we can or would circumvent.

Seems like a pretty important piece of information to share with potential users up front though, for something marketing itself with a privacy focus.

No, because KYC is not mandatory to use rewards and anonymously contribute to your favorite sites and channels. Only if you want to add funds or take out some or all of your revshare is it required. It's not required by default, which is why it should not be advertised as if mandatory. HTH

>KYC is not mandatory... except when you want to add or take out funds.

This is Brave's own cryptocurrency that they use to sell their privacy-based browser. It's an important distinction.

Lol. This is like Tesla saying regulations prevent them from releasing full self driving. Don't advertise something you can't deliver.

We deliver exactly what we advertise; users can enjoy the default ad-free experience, or opt-in, earn, and support content creators across the Web. Nowhere in our marketing or elsewhere do we suggest you can anonymously receive cash from companies like Amazon, Twitch, Walmart, etc.

You don't have the ability to offer private money collection and your advertising should reflect that.

He just said they don't advertise the ability to offer private money collection. Are you claiming they do? If not, then it would seem their advertising already correctly reflects this fact.

They claim to be a privacy focused browser that can pay users via cryptocurrency. Yet there is no point to pay via cryptocurrency when there is no privacy for receiving it.

As I understood it, they claim to be a privacy focused browser that distributes some sort of currency-like tokens to users, which the users can then distribute to websites they want to reward, or optionally pay out as cryptocurrency to recipients that may (or may not?) be identical with the users themselves.

That this optional payout requires identification seems to be A) a legal requirement, and B) an implementation detail of second-rank importance in the grand scheme of things.

Feels far-fetched to get one's knickers in a bunch over stuff like that not being at the forefront of their marketing.

Knickers to you may be outer garments to others. This browser has made a habit of asking users to interpret their actions "the right" way.

Look, maybe this is a good idea, and it is the future of getting people to pay for stuff like news or software. If so then they need someone who understands that vision and can project it with confidence. Right now I have no idea who runs Brave or what person I would look to for understanding their goals. For such an innovative concept you really do need a visible delivery vehicle with whom people can relate.

You could still the user of this during onboarding, or before the start seeing any BAT ads.

This is false. it is not a law. KYC is required for 3k+ and only in select countries. Brave is international.

So... I dunno... Just ignore the whole BAT/Rewards nonsense? I use none of that shit, though I do use Brave for a (very) few things that require a Chrome-like browser (i.e. Won't work in Firefox with my battery of plugins). I don't regard it primarily as a high-privacy tool (FF is better at that, though far from perfect) but it's better than using Chrome on non-Goog sites.

Ah, the world has become a strange place. I currently use no less than 5 different browsers for different contexts, but mainly Chrome for Goog properties on the seldom occasion I have to go there, FF for almost everything else. Then the corner cases...

Isn’t this only an issue if you actually want to cash out your $2 or whatever. The bigger benefit of Brave is that you can contribute money to websites or content creators that your prefer. This is like the “old” internet where ads didn’t care what content they were shown next to, giving much more freedom of expression on the net. Say YouTube thought your video joking about COVID meant they thought you deserved to demonetize your whole channel, we’ll now brave donations still allows you to make some sort of ad profit. That actually ads up for people from pennies from millions of people together. Cashing out for a few dollars a year is not really the intent of the system.

You can’t cash $2. There’s a 25 BAT minimum

I have been testing Brave for some time and i have not received lot of BAT since using it, i can summarize in few words but Brave are so cheap on paying BAT at the cost of giving you ads. For privacy better stick with Firefox or LibreWolf and earn crypto somewhere else.

Web ads are in general incredibly cheap per impression, so while I don’t know (nor particularly care to find out) where Brave’s ad prices come from, it’s not necessarily surprising or nefarious for them to be low.

How does KYC benefit them? Seems like (if legally allowed) they would want to reduce the friction as much as possible.

It's a shame how Brave Inc. has fumbled the execution of this concept. It's a great idea in principle: users earn currency for their attention (watching ads) or by outright purchasing it and avoiding ads, they get to choose which services they want to support and with how much, publishers get paid without slimy advertisers and GDPR headaches, while still keeping advertising in the loop but in a much more indirect and controllable way. It's brilliant. It would eventually allow getting rid of advertisers from the loop entirely with novel ways of earning currency.

Of course this is a pipe dream with the modern ad-powered web. Why would tech giants have a desire to make changes that would affect their main revenue stream? Advertisers wouldn't be thrilled either.

Still, I think it's the best idea that actually has some merit of working at scale to change how the web is monetized today. And we need more of those. Just maybe not executed by Brave Inc.

Isn't cashing out the tokens as a user sort of pointless anyway? I'm an impoverished student and Brave gives me a way to tip my favorite Youtubers at no cost to myself. They can decide for themselves if they want to sign up and cash out. I think that's really the main intent of the BAT system, nothing deceptive about it. If I wanted to earn trivial amounts of money anonymously, there are plenty of ways to do that.

> you need to provide your SSN and Driver's License to a third-party (Uphold) if you actually, you know, want to cash out.

This is the government's fault not Brave's. There are laws that enforce the requirements. We do not have the freedom to move value or money around freely any more.

It's Brave's fault if they only give you access to your BAT coins after signing up with Uphold. There should be no reason they hide access to your coins until you use a third party service to dox yourself.

Brave may not be implementing the dox'ing, but they appear to be requiring you to use someone else's implementation which is absolutely their fault.

I am guessing that the parent comment has it right. This is admittedly outside my area of expertise, but I would assume that the system they have for managing BATs is subject to the US's Know Your Customer laws, which require financial institutions (including crypto exchanges) to, well, know their customer. Personally.

They have to figure all that out before they give you access to your account. Which means, yeah, there may well be a good reason for them to require you personally identify yourself before giving you access to the tokens: if they didn't, they'd risk getting into serious trouble with the authorities.

They didn't technically need to contract that stuff out to a third-party company, of course. But, from a practical perspective, they did. They're a small browser company and financial regulation compliance would be a huge and burdensome departure from their core skill set. I don't think they could have afforded to do it themselves.

And that's all right and good, I'm actually OK with this being the requirement for a system like this if a browser that rewards you with crypto is available.

What I'm not OK with is that Brave isn't upfront about this.

Indeed. It's weird to see an organization whose entire sales pitch is, "Trust us, we're trustworthy," that persists in acting unnecessarily skeezy at seemingly every turn. Like, you half expect their next blog post to be, "We've been trying to reach you about your car's warranty..."

kyc laws only applies to exchanges that allow cashing out. I don't understand why kyc would be required here. The browser user should be the miner getting a reward as a private key. They should be able to move it to any exchange (this is where kyc is required) or trade privately.

Why they chose to implement the design in this way is not what I would expect.

> kyc laws only applies to exchanges that allow cashing out. I don't understand why kyc would be required here.

Because cashing out is kind of the entire point of BAT?

If creators couldn't redeem their BATs for actual spendable currency, they wouldn't really be any different from a Facebook Like button that people have to pay to click.

People sell their redditor accounts frequently for their digital tokens (upvotes) - reddit does not require people to use KYC.

Yes, I understand there is an implicit difference here, but this just shows how dumb KYC laws are to begin with as they can be easily bypassed by criminals and serve only to dox the law abiding citizens.

I, as a pro-social, well behaving, net positive contributor to society - have to trust everyone I do business with with my personal information. It's honestly absurd, if I were a criminal I would bypass this with great ease, yet because I want to behave legally I put myself at risk for identity theft frequently just to be able to do business with other people who also likely don't want to be responsible for securing my private information.

And I completely understand that. But Brave is still guilty of not mentioning on their product page that for all the privacy things they do, Brave Rewards isn't private, and also has a conflict of interest incentivizing them to not tell people about it.

You are also forgetting that another option is coming soon. Most of the userbase hates uphold, and they are adding Gemini soon, which should be much better.

KYC, AML, CYA, IANAL

KYC stands for "Know Your Customer" and it's a reference to laws that require businesses to have a clue who they're doing business with. It's not a legitimate response to the concern here. The concern is failure to provide adequate information about the consequences of your actions up front. They're going to benefit from the ads, and they won't necessarily have to pay for that benefit, because they didn't adequately obtain informed consent before they began by informing you that you need to pony up PII to a third party.

AML is probably Anti-Money Laundering. It again has nothing to do with informed consent. It is possible to prevent money from being laundered by telling a person up front, before they agree to sign up, that they have to give their private information to a third party.

CYA is probably "Cover Your Arse". Again, it's not a legitimate concern for the same reason as above.

IANAL is obviously not a response to the original concern but merely intended to reduce the risk of the reply. But there's no legal issues being raised. The issue is purely whether or not a business who praises their privacy credentials should clearly let their customers know that, if they choose to engage in business with them, their private information will need to be shared with a business who they may not trust.

If OP's story is true, Brave is not above engaging in distrust for dollars. That's the lesson to be learnt here. Brave doesn't care about your privacy. They just hope that by marketing privacy, they can get a few customers. And they will and apparently do engage in shady practices that compromise your privacy. No acronym can justify that, other than something that stands for "Businesses need to be responsible for their actions, not just their profits".

It was just a funny comment. They absolutely let you know in the docs on and the site and in every interview the CEO does that it is a requirement to complete KYC to receive the funds. I don't know what to say, it's all there, in the docs. In the FAQ: https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/360032158891-Wha...

I think your anger is misplaced - you should be angry at government who requires Brave (and eBay, and Etsy, and any company that is paying out money to people) to require this. If this wasn’t legally required they (and every other company) wouldn’t do it.

That, at least, does have a reason. Uphold is an online exchange and crypto wallet more popular in Europe but very similar to Coinbase. The government doesn't want money laundering and other financial crimes, and you might disagree with KYC but at least there's some argument there.

I don't like that Brave doesn't say, on their Brave Rewards page, warning: You will need to give up your privacy to cash out. If that's OK with you, great; if not, don't set your browser to show ads for months before you try cashing out or you'll get a nasty surprise.

From Brave's perspective, there's also a conflict of interest here. Remember, when an advertiser spends BAT to show an ad, 30% goes to Brave and 70% to the ad receiver. Brave has every incentive to get that 30%, don't they? If that means you were fooled into leaving your browser showing ads thinking you could cash out without losing your privacy, they benefit. And that's why it really smells fishy that they don't mention it on their product page.

I guess some users don't ever cash out and just use the rewards to fund the content they consume.

Sites like eBay would require user identity verification whether or not the government required it. Can you imagine the scale of fraud on eBay if users were allowed to set up anonymous accounts and accept irreversible currency transactions to anonymous sellers? It would be a scammer’s dream come true.

I wouldn’t have any interest in using such marketplaces.

As for Brave: Whether or not KYC or other regulations explain their behavior, any cryptocurrency rewards program has an inherent incentive to make it as difficult as possible to cash out. People who cash out almost always sell their coins, putting downward pressure on the price. If they can use dark patterns to reduce the number of people selling coins, the coin price stays higher.

The ideal cryptocurrency rewards program (for the crypto, not the users) would give people coins but almost force them to hold those coins and make it as difficult as possible to sell. This simultaneously hypes the coin by spreading awareness and removes downward price pressure by making it difficult to sell. This almost always means the company or founders have a lot of the coin that they plan to sell off as it becomes popular.

Virtually everything that comes attached with arbitrary crypto tokens or rewards is a scam to make the founders wealthy while the users chase pennies.

Using this dark pattern is probably necessary, as it is the only robust way to protect them from being click-frauded. You can earn only small rewards by watching ads in a single browser, so there is a big incentive to run as many automated brave instances as possible. Then send it all to one wallet and cash out. But one would need to complete KYC for each instance. You can't move the tokens without it, so it can't be scaled up.

Brave, Inc has no requirement to be located in the US that does require these laws, hardly the fault of the government they are choosing to be incorporated under that Brave chooses that particular geographical position, especially since the US probably has some of the worst examples in recent history for disregarding the privacy of citizens and non-citizens alike.

I'm pretty sure the US government is notorious for enforcing its financial laws well beyond its borders.

Is there a reason why brave has to do it but services like bing rewards doesn't? Also, AFAIK paypal allows you to do small transfers without verifying anything.

Not sure why you are downvoted.

I guess users could also send the tokens elsewhere to try and find an exchange that doesnt care about money laundering laws - but governments get quite involved in crypto.

Or is transfering tokens not possible?

Not with Brave, it is not. All of your tokens go into Uphold, and you must go through full KYC (providing your Driver's License and SSN), before you can move them to any other wallet. And no, the tokens your browser says you have, they aren't actually yours or transferrable until your KYC Verification is complete. The amount of tokens in your account before you complete Uphold verification is more of an IOU BAT until you create an account and get the actual BAT.

This is what is also egregious. Yes, BAT is decentralized when you move it around in wallets, but as far as the browser is concerned, all BAT you earn from receiving ads is actually quite centralized.

Thanks for clarifying - that indeed should have a big red warning sign for anyone signing up trying to collect BAT via Brave.

Let's presume this were true - that the Government was also at fault (I don't agree) - why does that excuse Brave's behavior?

If I go look at any other service which requires that kind of information, it's always right up front. Want a Robinhood account? Great, you have to provide the info when you open an acocunt.

I use brave and rewards but have never cashed out so didn’t provide any KYC info.

I just donate BAT to sites.

Brave does “request info up front” for users who want to use the wallet. Requesting it from users who won’t need it is a waste of time.

All Robinhood users perform financial transactions, very few Brave users do.

Is the lack of other options to send micropayments to sites the reason you do this? If there was a way to one click send micropayments to sites from a browser that did not require you to watch ads, but you send your own money, would you do it?

Honestly it’s because I’ve never had enough tokens to qualify for the minimum. So I just leave stuff in my wallet and transfer every once in a while.

I would prefer a wallet that I have control over, but I kind of ignore the BAT stuff and just use it because it’s a clean browser that’s easier for me than managing adblocker plug-ins. The tokens are just a bonus.