So over the past few days we determined that Brave does not stop all trackers and all forms of web surveillance.

We also determined that they do not put their best effort forward to protect you from being tracked by advertisers.

Every push notification that I have received from Brave has opened a webpage that had blocked trackers on it.

But now I am concerned about what trackers Brave missed and which of these websites have been able to track me.

The jet token that has been advertised heavily via Brave showed that 57 blockers were found on their advertised landing page.

How many trackers do you think Brave missed?

I am going to outline some of my primary concerns with the Basic Attention Token and list my reasons for selling. I would be very thankful if someone with more knowledge than myself is able to debunk these concerns.

• ICO

The initial coin offering on June 3 last year raised over $35 million dollars to be used for the development of BAT. This ICO was never registered with any regulatory agency in the USA or elsewhere. The legality of ICO's is very murky and we know that the SEC are actively targeting ICO's. We also know that the SEC has claimed, multiple times, that every single ICO meets the standards of a security and therefore anyone trading an ICO is engaged in the trading of unregulated securities which is illegal.

This uncertainty around ICO legality could have a very negative impact on BAT. Consider that Poloniex was recently acquired by Circle (Goldman Sachs) for $400MM. Polo does not list BAT. This could easily be a requirement by any major investor. Now imagine a major bank or investor approaches Bittrex and offers to buy them out but only on the condition that they delist all ICOs. What would Bittrex do? Think of it from a very simple risk/reward standpoint. BAT volumes on Bittrex are almost non-existent. Bittrex has ALREADY delisted coins with volumes as low as BAT. Why wouldn't Bittrex delist BAT when all it does is bring further regulatory scrutiny and hardly any trading fees?

• Too Difficult for Users

Beyond the regulatory aspects I also see a major problem with the Brave business model. Many of us had a misunderstanding regarding the function and operation of the BAT. For myself I imagined Brave would passively reward users with small amounts of the BAT as they browsed websites with normal advertisements (such as banners). If the user did not wish to see these advertisements they could just turn their Shield on. This will not be the case however.

Also consider the amount of personal data that Brave will be collecting. If you take Brendan Eich's example regarding someone shopping for a car you see that he is assuming the user will be perfectly fine with giving over personal information such as past browsing habits, location, purchasing history, etc... This information will be under the centralized control of Brave Inc. Now combine the the fact that Brave takes a very large cut of all payments to users and payments to publishers... Users are simply not going to do this. It's just too complicated and the payout isn't worth the effort.

• Microtransactions

Okay this is a big problem and can already be seen in many posts on the BATProject sub-reddit regarding payment outputs not going through. There is simply no way that the Ethereum blockchain can handle the number of transactions required for BAT to function properly. We learned a few years ago that microtransactions wouldn't work on the current BTC blockchain and we are now learning the same about the current ETH blockchain. (I used the word "current" for a reason.)

• Centralization

At the end of the day the BAT is a centralized token issued by a single company or you could also say a single point of failure. The regulatory issues as well as ETH blockchain bloat are not going to be solved this year. The Brave browser is still a very early beta and most of us are often switching between Chrome/Firefox and Brave because many functions simply do not work. I don't see Brave being able to open up payments to users this year either as people are already complaining about the inability to pay their favorite content producers as well as some users complaining about their BAT vanishing from the browser!

I'd like to believe but at the end of the day it's going to be too little and too late. The crypto space is highly competitive and I just do not have any more reason to hold BAT when there are so many other great opportunities out there.

Brave makes two claims on their website right now that are completely false. (Maybe even more)
I will not name the providers I am using to track users in Brave, because my intention is to bring awareness to the problem of being mislead, not to make it easier for someone to learn how to track Brave users.

Security research is a hobby of mine. I run paid ads for a living.

The fact that brave uses the verbiage "Full protection" should be enough for everyone to realize the wool is being pulled over your eyes.

1. Brave states on their home page that by default you have full protection against "Bounce Tracking". This is false, multiple pieces tracking software/technology exist where Brave did not protect me.

2. Brave states on their homepage in the FAQ section that "Brave blocks third-party data storage and IP address collection." This is false, my main tracking tool that I use in advertising campaigns still tracks what you do on my web pages and which IP address you accessed the page from.

I will however ultimately reveal these tools to a judge, they are not some secret tools that Brave can not find on their own. They are commercially available tools used by a large number of online advertisers.

Well well well. Looks like I (we) have hit a nerve huh? Apparently my posts about 'tough love' and 'begging for self-serve' are pissing some people off both in this subreddit and within Brave itself. Well...

What can I say except you're welcome.

A little passion is precisely what this project needs! Since I posted what I posted we have seen the iconic Luke Mulks in Reddit and Telegram posting multiple times. When was the last time we've seen that? Since I posted, we have seen the amazing Crypto Jennie (finally) create a Twitter account. Since I have posted we have gotten some changes and activity in Telegram (including a change to the pinned message). Since I have posted we have seen dozens of reddit posts in here defending Brave/BAT and talking about how to promote it.

Well holy freaking fuck you guys. This is how it should have been the whole time. So, if you need a bad guy to get you riled up a bit and taking action, I am happy to take on that role.

Being the BAT Bad Guy is a little unfamiliar to me since for years I have been posting very positive things here in this subreddit, in the cryptocurrency subreddit, in the altstreetbets subreddit, on Medium, and everywhere else I can think of. It is odd for me since I was one of the early members of the ambassador program and am a mod in telegram and have spent countless hours shilling Brave and BAT (and defending the technology, which I continue to do).

And now you say that I am engaging in FUD. Well fuck you all. I am not posting any FUD. I have made it abundantly clear that I am not selling BAT. I am buying more. I love the project, I love the technology, and I love the ability of the team to execute in so many ways. I love you all to much to let the one area where you aren't killing it to leave room for competition to swoop in.

So yes. Let your hatred for me flow through you. Let it consume you so you can prove me wrong. Make me look like an idiot (by being active. by posting. by marketing). I can take it. You're welcome. I'll help you all make me rich, whether you like it or not.

Spent years using it. Gained about 70$ or so worth of BAT. Since the changes with regard to regions uphold, how broken the Brave Wallet is, and everything else, I have given up.

For me, the main advantage of Brave was the privacy focus. Earning BAT for opting to see ads was just a bonus. But there are other browsers and extensions that can offer me the same (if not better privacy) settings, so I don't see the point in relying on Brave any more.

My prediction: Brave will soon (witin the next 2-4 years) go the down the drain just like tons of Chromium-based browsers before it.

...please just go back to Chrome/Firefox and your bloated internet.

The BAT payouts are BONUS to the whole Brave experience. Remove the BAT ecosystem completely from Brave and it still is the best option available, hands down.

Brave is about de-bloating the internet. It is about provide a more privacy friendly browsing experience, by default.

Now, the BAT ecosystem is about enabling content creator tipping. TIPPING. No one ever expected to become rich(er) through BAT enabled ads. If that's your vision, re-evaluate your priorities.

Thanks.

EDIT: As pointed out in the comments, the increasing popularity brought in the cool kids that believe they are entitled to free richness.

Why BAT dropping with so much good news going around?

Thank you Brendan.

I am extremely frustrated with the unprofessionalism of the Uphold wallet team and the forced integration for receiving BAT rewards.

I received this email from Uphold after they had my account under review for about 6 months.

https://imgur.com/a/RAv8G4q

There is absolutely nothing suspicious about my activity or my documentation. As far as I can tell they just decided to exit scam me for my $12 in BAT tokens with zero cause.

It is unacceptable for a cryptocurrency project to be this centralized in 2021. I liked the idea and the project, shame about the implementation.

It really seems like Brave can't get out of their own way. Instead of focusing on correct payouts or self serve ads, we get products that roughly 10 people use like Brave Talk and Playlist. I've been using Brave for 2+ years hoping they'd be able to put out a competent product, maybe work on advertising/expanding the brand. Instead we get that fucking idiot Luke Mulks on Twitter shitposting memes like a 12 year old. I know you read the sub Luke. Fuck you. Done using this shitty product and can't wait to see BAT drop to 0!

See title. Surely there is some sort of alternative, there are plenty of "earn crypto" websites/services that don't have any KYC (or, at the very least, they don't need you to send your ID because you want your earnings) and yet Brave chooses to force you to have a wallet that requires KYC. Why not just have a withdrawal system that allows you to simply enter an address and get your shit?

Well it is more than 0, but not really convince me to promote Brave browser or BAT ecosystem.
(I do own some BAT since ICO).

I was reading some twitter comments today and then I saw the Brave information that you can tip twitter comments. I thought, "thats cool I guess". But then I thought, "who wants this?" Which got me thinking, who actually wants this? I asked my gf and a few of my friends if they would ever tip a comment on reddit or twitter. Most of the responses were, "why would I do that?" followed with blank stares on why I was even asking such a ridiculous question. Was this Brendans idea to tip comments on reddit, twitter, social media ect or another persons?

This whole tipping business I'm guessing is years in the making and probably thousands of man hours and maybe even tens of millions of dollars to tip someone crypto for a comment. The consensus that I'm seeing so far is literally barely anyone cares. The "techie" people who're few and far between don't even seem to care that much and definitely investors don't care because the price almost always dumps whenever Brave tweets about tipping. Couldn't that time and money (investor money lets not kid ourselves) have been better spent on making a two way hardware wallet release sooner, ios ads sooner, marketing, a store to spend BAT, navigation away from uphold, a dev kit for gaming, some sort of mechanism to increase token velocity via said sdk, sooner, ect? These are just a few things off the top of my tired head. I'm sure in the morning with coffee I could come up with 10 more, the point being is the whole unfolding lackadaisical tipping venture with the prebuilt profiles everyone freaked out about earlier in the year has probably set the project back at least a year in my opinion. We don't even have a ios release date for ads and the tipping seems to be a priority. Maybe in a few months tipping will really take off, time will tell, until then I guess I'll tip some BAT to some of my favorite musicians on twitter (perturbator and carpenter brut) and do my part to help the tipping take off. Thanks for reading.

• Monthly active user growth slowing down.

• Token holders via etherscan haven’t grown in some days

• publishers signing up cut in half per day.

• Twitter @brave and $BAT tags are a ghost town now vs other crypto’s.

• Brave website rankings tanking (https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/brave.com)

• and the team isn’t transparent about anything ad related so hard to comment there, but with lower growth of the browser I’m sure ads aren’t growing either.

I’m sure this will be banned this post, but it’s literally the truth. What gives with this project? Lack of hype is literally the fast tract to failure.

Due to the increasing popularity and feasibility of using g stablecoins like DAI, I'm wondering what benefits BAT has over DAI. Obviously BAT was used to raise money, but ignoring that fact, and understanding that BAT isn't be marketed as an investment and is supposed to be a medium of exchange (or more a medium of account?) why wouldn't DAI be preferred?

I have been a huge believer in BAT since I first learned about them in 2018. Though with there terrible rewards I chose to opt out since they were giving me like .01 BAT on my laptop and nothing on my mobile. Like I have been seeing ads for months on this phone and I just checked my account balance and you would think I would have a few BAT but there are none here.

Thanks for reading

See title. It feels like a scam currently.

I know BAT is a different project that is growing together with Brave, but the current implementation goes against the sole purpose of the Brave browser: being privacy oriented.

Yeah, "laws" yada yada... This argument makes no sense for BAT earned from seeing ads!

Just a rant, anyway. Deactivating the ads all together from my 3 devices I was using with 30+ BAT already collected.