pikchurn

I think you don't understand the vast chasm between robotic capability and humans, and what can reasonably be done to close that gap. You're talking about making some sort of robotic geologist/biologist in the literal sense -- a humanoid robot or equivalent functionality that is space hardened, resists abrasive dust like nothing we have on Earth, requires no on-site maintenance, and is autonomous enough to operate for 10's of minutes at a time as good as it would be if humans were at the helm and it was next door.

I don't think you understand the scale of those requirements. It would be cheaper to send humans, even at absolutely ridiculous Apollo-on-steroid prices.

> It will cost $200 billion to get to Mars by 2040?

That's not a lower bound. That's an upper bound on what hopeful NASA contractors think they can milk the government for in doing it The NASA Way.

Robots don't get anywhere near the effectiveness of boots on the ground, even with the most advanced robotic explorers we have today. All of the science done by the Martian rovers could have been done by a human geologist in a few hours work (except the traversal itself, so let's add a day's hike on top of a few hours lab work). And the robots are only really able to inspect the stuff that happens to be exposed on the ground around them and easily reached by limited robotic manipulators.

Sending humans to Mars for even a 30-day mission would be orders of magnitude more science return than the entire robotic exploration program to date.

And that's without considering relativity time-lag. There's serious consideration of an orbital precursor mission to Mars that would put robotic handlers in Martian orbit, or a free-return trajectory near Mars, without a lander, to do little more than remote control a couple of Curiosity-style rovers that accompany them (and maybe visit one or both low-gravity martian moons). It's anticipated that the time-lag reduction alone could vastly increase the amount of science that could be done on a robotic mission before the nuclear batteries die or servos get clogged with dust.

And of course all the robotic arguments are predicated on basic science being the only reason to go in the first place. In reality, most of the people interested in Mars and space exploration generally want people to permanently settle in space. I actually don't give a damn whether there was once life on Mars.. but there damn well better be human societies there within my lifetime.

I would imagine the initial funding does not include the cost of the rocket. The risk of this effort is not in the trans-lunar stage. Reliable solutions for that can be purchased off the shelf. A seed-stage company needs to prove out the custom tech required for its own application, then if there's a business case what they're doing in the first place they can go raise additional funding at a higher valuation to cover the cost of launch. No reason to suffer many times more dilution on that now.

"In your favor" is how it is required to be implemented by law. You get the absolute best price on the books at the time it hits the exchange.

Of course that doesn't stop low-latency firms exploiting information differentials to get their bids in before your order makes it to the exchange, a process called front-running. It would be illegal for your own brokerage to frontrun you, but pretty much all discount brokerages sell information to third parties, which enables those third parties to front-run. Ever wonder why your Robinhood trades are free?

Because with traditional custodial assets there is a system in which there are verifiable records of ownership from which cost basis can be extracted, and a method for porting this information from custodian to custodian when assets are moved between brokerages. None of that exists for bitcoin, rather by design, as bitcoin resembles more of a bearer instrument than a traditional asset. Except in the simplest case where you buy coins from a single exchange, leave them on that exchange for the entire time you hold them (against all best practices), and then sell on that same exchange, there is absolutely no way for the exchange to know what your cost basis was, whether it was short term or long term capital gains, etc.

How would Coinbase know the cost basis of coins transferred in?

Why would Coinbase issue 1099s? And on what basis? Keep in mind it holds custodian funds in a wallet service, like a bank account. If I deposit 1 BTC when it is worth $5,000, does Coinbase report that as $5,000 of income on my 1099? I hope not! What if I withdraw that same 1 BTC when it is worth $16,500, should Coinbase tell the IRS I made $11,500 in gains? But I didn't sell anything! I just moved something I already owned from one place to another. That's not a taxable event.

If I use my bank to transfer you money, the bank isn't responsible for filing a 1099 to report that income to you; I am. Using coinbase to transfer funds to you should be handled the same, and Coinbase is a wallet and merchant service as much as it is an exchange.

Now selling coins is always a taxable event. But when properly using an exchange, the coins should not be kept "on account." So ideally, every bitcoin sold was transferred into Coinbase/GDAX prior to the sale. How does Coinbase know the cost basis to report? It doesn't. Not unless that information is freely provided by the user, in which case it is fully unverifiable and the user would be free to put whatever the heck they want. Should Coinbase be required to file 100% self-reported tax information from its users without any way to verify the authenticity of that reported cost basis and time held?

The first one was reorg'd out of the chain. It was a soft-fork, just deployed in response to something rather than in anticipation.

Likewise in the second case, where there was a temporary soft-fork put in place to limit the block size so as to not run afoul of the bug, which itself wasn't a hard-fork or a soft-fork but rather a probabilistic failure to achieve consensus under transient circumstances.

A limit order. Specifically a fill-or-kill limit order for the cancellation part.

Most people don't realize a limit order isn't "buy at this price" but rather "buy at the best price in my favor, but don't spend more than this much."

Fill-or-kill means don't put it on the books, just get it now or cancel. You can also typically specify whether it is a partial fill-or-kill too (get it all or none at all).

I never quote adoption. Bitcoin isn't a currency, it's a store of value. Just like gold which it seeks to emulate. It's useful as the collateral for fully-backed smart contracts. Not paying for coffee.

So set a limit order at half the current price, or whatever.

Placing a market order is equivalent to saying "I'll accept $0 for this asset, so long as that was the best price available." Only most people assume it means "I'll pay the number shown, or something close to it" which is only true of relatively stable assets on markets with plenty of liquidity. Making only limit orders available forces the market participant to choose what range of prices they would find acceptable.

Hard-forked? Never. But you don't need to hard-fork to secure the network. Bitcoin HAS soft-forked several times to close of critical zero-day vulnerabilities, although to be fair this was in the early days of the network. (There was multiple ways in which any random participant could spend anyone's funds in the early days. They were all honorably disclosed and fixed without being exploited.)

That's a lot of assertions without any backup. Here's one thing bitcoin has that no altcoin has: the legitimacy of its network buy-in from being first to market. And since any technology another chain has can be adopted via sidechain, extension block, or soft fork, why not standardize on the one currency that has achieved the most adoption?

> I know at lease two people that transferred their money in to BTC before filing for bankruptcy to side their assets.

That.. wouldn't accomplish anything. Not by itself. The other side will ask for discovery of financial records, ask for and receive discovery of exchange record (or, if it's cash withdraws for localbitcoins, demand plausible receipts for what it was used for, which will then be investigated). Outside a total fabrication of a false history of losses, involving probably multiple accounts of self-perjury and external help and a lot of luck, I don't see that actually working, and the risk of ending up in jail for a looong period of time is massive.

Source: I've worked an actual divorce case involving bitcoin.

> Hopefully laws can put in place for proper taxation.

There's no need for new laws here. It's entirely covered by existing laws regarding the appreciation of value to capital gains property, with published IRS rules. There's actually not a lot of uncertainty here.

> And this is where the "promise" of anonymous currency/assets falls apart.

The "promise" (future vision?) of cryptocurrency is that you won't have to sell it, ever. Do your business, buy your groceries, pay your mortgage and taxes in it.

Whether that's realistic or not I haven't the energy to debate on HN. But it is certainly incorrect to say that bitcoin/USD exchanges have any sort of place in the cypherpunk utopic vision of a cryptocurrency future.

That's not what people are objecting to in this case.

This is not a family law judge subpoenaing coinbase for records. I've actual been an expert witness on such a court case and where Coinbase complied and gave the transaction history, for the record.

This is not the FBI or some regulator's enforcement arm investigating money laundering and having a court order requesting details of specific accounts. I'm sure they comply there too.

Nor is the IRS requesting information on specific people they think failed to report their taxes. That too would be understandable.

This is a fishing expedition. The IRS is requesting coinbase to turn over all personal information of all accounts and the entire transaction histories, with no specific basis given.

This is the financial privacy equivalent of court-order wiretapping vs dragnet surveillance. It is entirely reasonable to be angry about this.

Case in point: I bought and sold bitcoin on Coinbase at that time, as part of my non-registered sole proprietorship consulting business--I was paid by my clients in bitcoin, and purchased some on behalf of my father. As per the advice received by my accountant at that time, prior to publication of any IRS rules regarding bitcoin, I merely reported aggregate values of my own sales, not individual trades, on my Schedule C business income part of my personal 1040. Even in light of later advice published by the IRS, it's not clear that this was the incorrect way to file since it business income is handled differently. So I paid my taxes, legitimately, but there's no mention of bitcoin, or the individual trades that were made to cash out that bitcoin on Coinbase.

But, it now seems that the IRS is going to get a data dump that has my name and a bunch of bitcoin trades from years ago, and have no way of knowing that I already paid taxes on them. And, bad on me, I'm not sure I have sufficient record to prove my story, or if I do it will take a lot of unpaid work to put together. So I'm either going to get hit with an excessively large tax bill, or deal with a lot of pain and suffering and personal cost fighting this in tax court, losing a ton of my time for having done nothing wrong.

Fuck that. That's why we have due process and don't allow law enforcement fishing expeditions. False positives have a cost.

> Interesting that there is a maximum rate.

Besides the other excellent reasons given, these sorts of clauses sometimes exist to protect the company. If the union has control over who works, as is often the case, they could choose to allow excessive overtime and make the airlines pay out for it regardless of whether circumstances really demanded it.

They don't usually do this because it's not in the favor of the union to keep people out of work. But there are always extraneous circumstances that could result in such outcomes, for example a national emergency that causes a shortage of pilots and those who stick around are contractually able to pull in ridiculous overtime while at the same time AA is restricted from changin flight schedules based on labor costs alone, etc.

Bitcoin developers do use valgrind. I don't know about B2X, but the Bitcoin Core guys do.