Yesterday, my computer crashed. For hours, I was not able to get it to start back up. It was an old model anyway, I had most of files saved on the cloud, so this was not something I couldn’t manage.
Then I remembered that my BAT tokens were linked to my device. Over the last 3 months, I had accumulated ~7 BAT (5 from previous months, ~2 due this month) and was hoping that slow and steadily I would have amassed enough to verify an Uphold account by the end of the year. But now here I was, in this position where I was going to have to start from scratch.
Now if I did have an Uphold account, I would be able to access these on another device, but as is, it was as if they had burned in a fire. If I had just 20 more BAT, I would have been able to hold onto the 5 on my device and redirect the pending ~2. But as it were, I can no longer use that 7 to afford the Uphold verification requirement.
Lucky for me, it turned out my computer wasn’t bricked after-all and I was able to get it to work eventually. So there is that.
A few weeks prior I had discovered that if I were to move all my Brave Browser files and folders to an external drive and then reload it on my device, the BAT funds would still be saved. I haven’t mustered the courage to see if this same process of “Browser state cloning” would work on another device, but at the very least I have discovered one way to preserve BAT funds on an unverified account.
Surely, this shouldn’t be the only fail-proof mechanism for an unverified account. Does the Brave Team have any alternative methods in mind, for future versions? If not, I would like to ask the developers to reconsider.
Thanks in advance.