I will defend Firefox before I defend Brave. And I do not even use Firefox.
I use Zen. It is not the most private browser on earth, but it is a real improvement over base Firefox and I love using it. If you want Chromium, Helium is great. Ungoogled Chromium is great. There are good options in every direction. Brave is not one of them.
Brave is not a privacy browser. Brave is a crypto scammer company.
Default install today: BAT rewards, Brave Wallet, Leo AI, Brave VPN, Brave News, Brave Talk, Brave Search promos, sponsored new tab page, built-in torrent client. There are entire community projects whose only job is to ship registry scripts that turn this stuff off. Users debloat a "privacy" browser. Read that again.
And the track record is rough.
2020: Brave got caught auto-injecting its own affiliate code into URLs you typed yourself. You typed binance . us, Brave silently rewrote it to binance . us/?ref=35089877. Same for Coinbase, Ledger, Trezor. Brendan Eich defended it first, called it a mistake only after the backlash. Open source did not save anyone here. The code sat in the repo for ten weeks before anyone noticed.
2018: Brave collected BAT "donations" for Tom Scott and other creators who had never signed up, using their names and photos. When Scott asked for the money back, Brave said refunds were impossible.
2021: Brave's built-in Tor mode leaked every . onion address you visited to your regular DNS provider for months. If you used Brave to hide your dark-web activity, your ISP saw all of it. The bug shipped to stable in November 2020 and only got fixed in February 2021 after a researcher went public.
Use what you love. Zen, Librewolf, Mullvad, Helium, Ungoogled Chromium, base Firefox if you want, even Safari. A browser whose business model is shoving shitcoin and a paid VPN at you is not a privacy product. It is an ad-tech company with better marketing.
Value is not a physical thing
To all the people who think bitcoin can’t have value because it’s not tangible...
Tangible assets constitute the following percentage of the Mag7 market caps:
Nvidia: 0.66%
Apple: 1.38%
Tesla: 4.06%
Microsoft: 7.29%
Alphabet: 8.39%
Meta: 9.56%
Amazon: 16.28%
Combined weighted average: 5.79%
If you liquidated all of these companies’ physical assets, they wouldn’t amount to 6% of their valuation. There have been days in which the market caps of these companies have moved by more than the total value of their physical assets.
If 94% of the value of the most valuable companies on earth is non-physical, then value does not have to be physical.
If digital things have no value, then you should have no problem with giving me your computer to erase all the data from it. I will return your computer to you in the same exact physical form. I will just press a few buttons that remove all your data, photos, and contacts, and make it impossible for you to restore them. If value can only be tangible, then all of these digital things have no value, and you shouldn’t mind me deleting them as long as the devices return in their original state. I don’t think you would.
Technology, data, business knowledge, customer base, brands, and so much more are non-physical assets whose value likely exceeds that of all the planet’s physical objects and land. This is something most people understand in their daily lives, but because most people have no understanding of money, they do not understand how it applies to money, too.
Most people think their money is physical, but in reality, most fiat currencies today are 90%+ digital, and usually less than 10% of the supply is physical paper money. There are no stacks of dollars in your bank sitting in a box under your name, available for you to pick up at any time. A tiny fraction of the money is physical, and the rest is digital, manufactured in various quantities by your bank, government, central bank, and other pedophiles, in quantities based on pure vibes. People still give this non-physical fiat money value because it is the only money they can use with a bank account, since governments only license banks that use their local fiat shitcoin. There is no need for the money to be physical to work; digital fiat money works as well as physical fiat money; or as badly.
Bitcoin is an entirely digital money, but it is given value for far more intelligent and peaceful reasons than fiat money. You can read more about that in my books The Bitcoin Standard and The Fiat Standard, which you can buy from Amazon or https://t.co/Va3iL87Ups.
A common objection to bitcoin’s value is: “But if people stop believing in the value of bitcoin it can lose all value.” But that is true of everything. If people stop believing in the value of gold, it would lose value and just become another worthless rock. If people stop believing in the value of electronic devices then Apple and Nvidia go to zero. If people stop believing in the value of Manhattan, then all Manhattan real estate goes to zero. If people discover that tomatoes are poisonous, they stop believing in the value of tomatoes, and the entire planet’s tomato industry goes to zero. Just because something is physical does not guarantee its value, as we can see from the infinite amount of sand and rocks on our Earth left completely untouched by human hands. Physical things can be valueless and non-physical things can have value. Value and physicality are two independent things that are orthogonal to each other. You are doing yourself a disservice if you are unable to benefit from the world’s most advanced money and best saving technology because you are unable to see that value can be non-physical in this one instance, when you have no problem seeing it elsewhere.
Yes, we need "builders" all right!
But not for fancy, novel, shining "use cases": for trivial, boring, basic-bitch ones, which are still shitty!
We don't have decent and simple tooling yet for acquiring sats, hodling sats and spending sats, with some minimum level of privacy and state-resistance (which is the ONLY reason for Bitcoin to even exist in the first place).
And you dream of subsidizing a new wave of bored Silicon-Valley kids with anxiety issues and pronouns in bio, to further waste our time hyping "smart contracts", "NFT" scams, "agentic" bots and "Quantum" nonsense? Fuck them. They can stay in the current-thing fiat bubble.
We need cypherpunk engineers with long-enough attention spam to focus on real, boring things.
It's 2026, and when a normie asks me a tool to use Bitcoin properly, I *don't* have a clean, simple answer.
I teach them to stack sats avoiding KYC, but bisq and robosats and vexl are far from perfect and standard. People use shit like binance.
I teach them to hodl keys properly, but airgapping and multisig with coldcard, seedsigner, liana, sparrow, nunchuck are far from perfect and standard (let alone if they want to manage inheritance).
I teach them to use the Lightning Network to pay small amounts, but really usable LN last-mile security models, like arks and mints, are still early and don't have good tooling yet, and wallets with decent, contact-based UX, like Blitz, are still niche and experimental.
I teach them to run nodes instead of blindly trusting third parties and leaking sensitive information, and to conjoin from and to cold-storage, but even with node-in-a-box tools like Start9+JAM, syncing a full node is still terrible UX, and running joinmarket effectively far from trivial.
And what about having all those things in a single consistent app or framework? Still a wet dream!
Fuck your imaginary, scammy "new use cases". Shitcoins already exist for those. Let's fix the real ones.
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