lead what? https://archive.is/W0k4j

(disclaimer: people remember how sketchy Brave is)

Don't forget when they took donations on behalf of other websites and kept the money unless the operator went to the "escrow account" to collect it

Jesus dont you see they are trying atleast an alternative to non consensual anal probes by other ad companies?

The grants came from our token fund, not users' tokens (no way to buy BAT then).

The issue which I found out about late, and fixed right away, was infringing on right to publicity, nothing to do with donations from users' own tokens.

That was just a concept, it never made it to a live build AFAIK.

What they should have done instead is just take hundreds of millions of dollars from Google, like a non-sketchy browser.

Already shared, but that (what you linked to) was a proposal and no deliverable was ever publicly released. A simple prototype was made and tested by a limited number of employees - instead of showing an ad, it would show a picture of a mustachioed man as a placeholder. That silly picture would be replaced with real code if the idea panned out. It didn't. The idea and the code was canned before I joined Brave and I've been here for almost 10 years (I joined August 2016).

Disclaimer in case it's not obvious: I am a Brave employee

I definitely tried out brave several years ago and legit got lots of crypto ads. I really don’t know how you are getting upvoted for lying about this.

Maybe you forgot your meds back then.

Wild accusations considering this stuff still exists online as direct evidence: https://brave.com/blog/binance/

Also attacking the person instead of the ideas is really not in the spirit of HN.

That blog post is about a partnership (which ended), but you probably saw some sponsored images at the time, in new tab pages (1 of 4 then, I think; the rest are just art images).

These are non-tracking, carefully designed (including vetting by Brave), brand advertising images. They are not ads (we never did this) inserted into publisher pages, or (opt-in only) push notifications.

Brave has been working to find ways to sustain ourselves, and these sponsored images are still a good revenue line, although lesser now vs other lines. If you want, turn them off.

Free riding is always an user right, we don't try to stop it on principle, as if we ever could with open source. But there's no free lunch: if you use Firefox, you are Google's product. If you use a Firefox fork, you're free riding on Gecko which costs a lot to maintain. HTH

“Sponsored images”

What exactly do you think an advertisement is?