archive.today/archive.is is a website that allows for on-demand archiving of the contents of a website. It captures sites as they would be displayed in a modern browser.
It's a useful website for keeping archives of contents that might be followed by deletion later and it's also useful for keeping an exact, verifiable copy of a website at a certain time.
The owner is anonymous and for the longest time of the website's existence didn't accept donations. Offering this service pro-bono and without even accepting acknowledgment or assistance.
So, what does this have to do with Brave Broser? Brave Brower is a chromium fork that integrates Basic Attention Token (BAT). The browser features a built-in ad-blocker. Users can opt in to view ads and receive rewards for this, while webmasters can opt-in to also receive rewards for the BAT-supported ads on their website. Another feature of the browser was to allow users to donate BAT that would be pledged to a website's webmaster. The inclusion of a built-in ad blocker on the browser had sparked fury upon its release,
with the organization behind the browser receiving a cease and desist signer by 1200 publishers.
But what did brave do now? The organization behind Brave browser appears to have broken their side of the contract with the owner of archive.is, embezzling roughly 1500 USD that were voluntarily contributed by users towards the website via the browser. I'll put the saga in a timeline for easier reading below. This is from the
'Ask' me Anything section of archive.is.
Which was followed by one final block post publishing the email exchange between archive.is and brave.com. It's too big to screencap so I'll just link it for those interested:
https://blog.archive.today/post/626174398020403200/please-provide-all-the-details-about-how-brave
It seems like archive.is webmaster transferred his domains to a friend. And as a result, Brave decided to withhold that person's own funds via Uphold citing nationality.
I have some opinionated commentary on this. Basically I find it quite appalling for Brave browser to deny people their funds based on nationality. I think archive.is' webmaster puts it exactly right by calling this Aryanization. Crypto affords people the opportunity to conduct transfers of value regardless of their background, independent from government oversight, independent from restrictions from regulators and politicized payment processors... Only to then apply nationalist policy on who gets to benefit from their service? What's the point of using crypto if you're not going to allow your services users to reap its benefits? Brave acts much like a protectionist national leader. They want to participate in international trade for the sake of not missing out on its benefits, but only so that they can squeeze out the maximum benefit out of others, instead of actually giving back.
TL;DR altruistic webmaster behind free on-demand web-archive service archive.today states he can accept donations via Brave browser's feature, days later org behind Brave denies him his donations citing nationalist rhetoric.
