No, the Brave browser does not try to verify that the page that it's replacing ads on has opted into Brave's "rewards" thing. They'll s/page_ads/brave_ads/ and collect a check regardless of if that revenue is going to the page owner or not.
My point was that this literally does not happen. Brave does not insert ads into pages, ever, it only removes them. I'll admit I'm skeptical of the whole cryto-currency model, too, but I try to keep my points factually accurate.
They aren't. The brave ads appear as a system notification at fixed intervals whether or not you're browsing. They're as disconnected from your browsing activity as they could possibly be.
The only connection is that your browsing activity determines how much each content provider is owed.
Could you please stop spreading misinformation? As the surrounding commentors have mentioned, Brave Rewards is completely opt-in for users _and_ they do verify whether the page is a part of the program _and_ they don't replace ads with their own.
Why would they have to? The user has opted in. From your link: "Starting today, users of Brave’s latest release of the desktop browser for macOS, Windows, and Linux can choose to view privacy-preserving Brave Ads by opting into Brave Rewards" [emphasis mine]
Like everything on Brave it's all up to the user. First the user has to opt-in to this ad program. By default Brave simply blocks everything. If they opt-in then they will be able to see a number of ads per hour that they specify. Of these ads, 70% of the revenue will go straight to the user and 30% will go to brave. The user then decides how their coins will be spent. There are straight forward ways for users to support their favorite sites or content creators. So imagine you want to support site.com, you could choose to automatically donate some chunk of your tokens to it per month. From then on everything would be automatic, the user would just browse as normal, accumulate tokens, and the site would be compensated.
In my opinion this is also the ideal system since it removes the fundamental problem of advertising. And that is that when a company relies on advertising, their customer is no longer the people visiting their site - but the advertisers they make money from. This can lead to advertiser influence slowly creeping into every aspect of the site, including the content that is created. By directing the ad revenue to the user who then directs it to sites (at their discretion) it keeps the benefits of "free" sites, while removing all the nastiness that generally comes with ad-based revenue systems by untangling the relationship between advertiser and content creator.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18734999