The very important difference being you are not publically showcasing your browser.

A more appropriate analogy is buying a card with a gun attached in the trunk or interior. It's weird but not a negative.

or, instead of using a gun to make your analogy sound scary, we could use something that actually occurs in real life like getting a car with a tape deck you don't want.

> And they really go out of their way to make it as hard as possible to disable/hide the wallet and all related crypto stuff.

I found this in 15 seconds: https://www.makeuseof.com/brave-disable-crypto-features/

I looked at the link you provided. I must say, as a dolt-level techie (74-year-old retired neurosurgical anesthesiologist) that the instructions appear VERY involved. I expected a simple on/off button but instead it's like something I'd find on HN....

It's overly wordy, probably for SEO reasons.

First, it's opt in. So you'd only need to opt out if you'd opted in at some point.

The instructions boil down to: Click settings, uncheck Brave Rewards button.

The rest of the article tells how to disable new tab background ads, remove the rewards UI, and how to do it again on mobile...but these are more personal preference things.

That is probably only cosmetic as the crypto related background processes will continue running and cannot be turned off. https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/5429

I haven't installed brave in a long time, but maybe someone can try disabling the 'features' and check if these processes then turn off or not.