Brave's whole business model is flawed, even ignoring shenanigans like this.
They claim they want to fix everything wrong with today's web (annoying and privacy-invasive ads, etc) by replacing them their own ads backed by a shitty cryptocurrency. While this might work in the short term while the browser is niche, they will have no choice but to deploy the same techniques once it goes mainstream and ad fraud goes up, removing their only selling point.
The only real solution here is to just admit that view-based or click-based advertising on the web is flawed (and will always be vulnerable to fraud) and get rid of it, replacing it with time-based advertising where you pay for an ad to stay up for a certain period of time regardless of how many clicks or views it gets, making it immune to fraud and reducing the need for privacy-violating analytics because the only analytic that matters is "do we make more money?". Of course, this real solution wouldn't allow opportunistic middlemen to make money out of thin air, so that's why we have Brave instead.
> by replacing them their own ads backed by a shitty cryptocurrency
This is not true at all, and it has been talked enough here but I figured I'd explain it again. The Brave ads are opt-in, for people who would like to earn "shitty" cryptocurrency by clicking on them.
They are fixing the ad issue by blocking the ads and letting you "pay" the sites with BAT tokens. This can be done by a one-time donation or automatically each month (based on your attention). Reason for the Basic Attention Token name.
They claim they want to fix everything wrong with today's web (annoying and privacy-invasive ads, etc) by replacing them their own ads backed by a shitty cryptocurrency. While this might work in the short term while the browser is niche, they will have no choice but to deploy the same techniques once it goes mainstream and ad fraud goes up, removing their only selling point.
The only real solution here is to just admit that view-based or click-based advertising on the web is flawed (and will always be vulnerable to fraud) and get rid of it, replacing it with time-based advertising where you pay for an ad to stay up for a certain period of time regardless of how many clicks or views it gets, making it immune to fraud and reducing the need for privacy-violating analytics because the only analytic that matters is "do we make more money?". Of course, this real solution wouldn't allow opportunistic middlemen to make money out of thin air, so that's why we have Brave instead.