(disclaimer: people remember how sketchy Brave is)
What they should have done instead is just take hundreds of millions of dollars from Google, like a non-sketchy browser.
The issue which I found out about late, and fixed right away, was infringing on right to publicity, nothing to do with donations from users' own tokens.
Disclaimer in case it's not obvious: I am a Brave employee
Also attacking the person instead of the ideas is really not in the spirit of HN.
These are non-tracking, carefully designed (including vetting by Brave), brand advertising images. They are not ads (we never did this) inserted into publisher pages, or (opt-in only) push notifications.
Brave has been working to find ways to sustain ourselves, and these sponsored images are still a good revenue line, although lesser now vs other lines. If you want, turn them off.
Free riding is always an user right, we don't try to stop it on principle, as if we ever could with open source. But there's no free lunch: if you use Firefox, you are Google's product. If you use a Firefox fork, you're free riding on Gecko which costs a lot to maintain. HTH
What exactly do you think an advertisement is?
Brave never did that.
Brave blocks third-party ads & trackers by default.
(disclaimer: I lead privacy and adblocking at Brave)