Decentralized wealth is crypto. Sure, there are scams, but the point is to pay people for viewing ads (wealth re-distribution in a decentralized fashion). No one else is paying you to view ads; they are just taking your engagement data, your face and eye gaze data, your mouse trajectory data, etc. Brave is the first to try to pay you a portion of its ads revenue in a way that you the end user can flip into whatever currency you want, including USD. I've never been cut a check from Google, Amazon, Facebook, or the like. But I've received BAT, which I can flip into ETH/BTC, and earn more money.
> Maybe Brave the browser isn't outright a "scam," but the willingness of the company to dip into scam-enabling technologies like crypto makes the brand toxic, and anything by the company is immediately suspect.
Do you use any resource owned/operated by Google? Amazon? JPMorgan Chase? Facebook? Bank of America? Wells Fargo? (to name a few) All of these companies "dip into scam-enabling technologies like crypto."
Do more research.
Isn't the Matrix protocol quite clearly the better alternative to Signal?
There are several options--host your own (matrix server), use a free public server (matrix.org), or pay someone to host a server instance for you (e.g., element.io). The Element clients are good enough by now for all platforms (web, desktop, mobile). What's not to love?
Hopefully this can change some day, and Matrix (or something like it) will become ubiquitous. But it was a slog for Signal to gain even its small market share, despite its better usability and lower barriers to entry.
For lack of a better alternative, we "standardized" on Signal as the de-facto secure messaging system that is outside of the control of ad companies, and it will take time to rectify that.
This is a ridiculous take. Every technology you use that facilitates payments or communication is, objectively speaking, "scam-enabling".
The presence of ads and/or crypto is a strong signal that you're working with an untrustworthy entity, whose objectives will not be aligned with your own.
Maybe Brave the browser isn't outright a "scam," but the willingness of the company to dip into scam-enabling technologies like crypto makes the brand toxic, and anything by the company is immediately suspect.
The same is true for Signal, for what it's worth, as it still supports Moxie's pet shitcoin.
It's easy enough to opt out of Brave because Firefox exists, but there's still sadly no better alternative to Signal.