Not happy with Brave's changes to Search and Rewards

I don’t have a reason to leave them yet, but I will say I haven’t been happy with some of their decisions recently. First, the changes to BAT requiring a KYC-laden custodial wallet and now this… I hope this isn’t marking a negative direction for the company in general because I still love Brave.

I will say this has always been a thing. If anyone wanted to access their BAT, KYC/AML always been required. Only so-called exception was that they gave us all full control of tipping. So yeah, that was taken away.

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Well yes, and that’s fair I suppose (still not a fan of KYC exchanges at all) but I don’t see why they needed to remove the ability to direct where our tips went.

Copy/paste of something I answered to someone else. At least paints a bit of a picture. Again, I still think they could have gone a different way than they did, but it’s essentially the core of what everyone at Brave is saying:

What happened though is there was a lot of fraud and abuse of the system. People who are in regions that couldn’t be supported by custodial partners due to regulations were then trying to circumvent restrictions by offering to sell tips to people. So a “I’ll tip you my 10 BAT and you send me 5” or whatever. You had people who were also setting up emulators running many instances of Brave to maximize earnings with the intent to do this, often using methods where they weren’t doing KYC/AML.

This could get Brave in a lot of trouble if they permitted it to keep happening, as it would be said they are allowing money laundering to occur or that it was directly allowing the funding of crime. Due to the excessiveness of people doing this, Brave changed the system to what it is now. You can read some about it at https://brave.com/rewards-changes/

I mean, they say for accounting purposes too. But primarily it was the fraud and abuse of Rewards that resulted in it.

10 times out of 10 when someone says “it’s because of fraud” it means “we built a badly designed system and don’t want to admit we are to lazy to try to fix it”.

@lorewright and @talgeeze just a FYI, I moved this over to its own topic rather than leaving in the Search one because conversation shifted a bit. Especially as I was seeing Talgeeze and possibly others respond more to the Rewards side of things. Just wanting to try to keep off topic conversation separated if we can. Maybe all would be good since it was lorewright’s topic anyway, but just trying to make it easy and not get things lost in the mix.

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Well, this is what they are saying. Brave never intended to let vBAT last as long as they did. It can be debated whether it should have ever been a thing. They started off building everything and tried to meet demand. Also, crypto regulations were much different at the beginning than they are now.

The system they built just doesn’t work now. It hasn’t really been working well for a while. What was supposed to be a temporary measure is what people expected to be permanent. Brave was trying to drag it out as long as they could, but then finally hit a breaking point where they just couldn’t do it anymore.

Not at all. It’s that they finally stopped delaying it. Removing vBAT is the fix. Admitting they did wrong by giving us the system we had been using. Not explaining to people very clearly that it’s not permanent and they’d be changing also is a mistake they made.

That said, they are putting in a lot of effort to fix it. They’re also doing their best to accommodate everyone in the process. One could argue they should have just pulled the plug and fully got rid of vBAT already, but they still haven’t done so. They are giving time for people to be able to use up what they had or to try to link to custodial partners. I know they have also been having lots of meetings and trying to negotiate contracts with other exchanges that would allow access to other countries. But eventually, that cord is going to have to be pulled and some people aren’t going to be happy about it.

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Give a dog a bad name and hang him.

It’s especially even more true has the topic been raised years ago and they dismissed it as being a non-issue. A solution had even been suggested, and bluntly ignored.

No worries, thanks for letting me know. I apologize for derailing the topic haha

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