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Comment by acatton | Hacker News Reader

I totally get you, as a long time Mozilla fan, I'm sad to see the direction towards which Firefox and Mozilla as a whole are going.

But it's not like Brave is ethically or technically better. They use Blink (the same engine as Chrome) and therefore contribute to the mono-culture of the web.[1]

They collect donations on behalf of content creators[2], they created this "Attention Token" based on etherium to replace ads with all the controversies surrounding cryptocurrencies (from the pyramid-scheme to the global-warming topic, I know the latter is not valid with Etherium anymore), …

I think that these days, it's more about choosing the lesser evil as a browser.

[1] https://archive.md/S7GZf

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Brave_(web_browse...

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We do indeed use Chromium, though patched for security and privacy reasons (see https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Deviations-from-...). I don't see how that's an ethical or technical mark against us, however. Early on we did tests with Gecko, but soon found that if we were to build a compatible (with the Web as it is) browser, we'd need to do so with Chromium.

Your claim that Brave collected donations on behalf of others is quite misleading. There was a bit of confusing UI in our early tips interface (called 'Payments' at the time). We clearly marked verified creators as such, but gave no special marking for unverified creators (our approach resembled that of Twitter's blue checkmarks).

Regarding the "donations" themselves, we allowed Brave users to direct BAT from our user-growth pool (that is, Brave's own tokens) to creators. If those tokens were not claimed by the intended recipient after 1 year, they (Brave's tokens) would be recycled back into the system. As Wikipedia records, there were major UI/UX changes made about 48 hours later which dramatically improved the feature, IMHO.

The latter is still valid for Ethereum until the update to ETH v2 and Proof of Stake is live. We are not there yet.

When is this expected to go live? I thought we'd be there by now.

It's been "coming soon" for years. It's basically just a greenwashing tactic that never has to be delivered on.

$5 billion+ is staked on ETH2 already. It's delivered, it just takes time to migrate the entire market cap.

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