mostly out of our reach unless you have way of removing it from the sun without your retrieval craft melting or being captured by the suns gravity well or from gas giants without the onboard system being fried by the intense radiation or again captured by the gravitation.
If we have such advanced tech, and trip to big planets would seem economically feasible, I think we will be long beyond the point of desperately needing transporting helium to do such crazy trips.
>More regulation won't help here, because the regulation-maker is itself the hostile party.
It's easy to paint the big gov as bad, but this is a case where unfortunately the populace seems to be in agreement with the big bad gov. While most US citizens support encryption, 76% or so, the vast majority 63% also favor government "backdoor" access for national security reasons.
I guess either we believe in democracy or we don't. It could be said that if Veracrypt isn't/can't be backdoor'd, perhaps the gov is simply implementing the will of the people :( via Microsoft.
Does the majority of the population even have a self-formed opinion on this or are they just parroting what the media tells them (which in many "democratic" countries is directly or indirectly controlled by the government, i.e. propaganda).
WASHINGTON, DC—Assuming that there must be a good reason for the order, U.S. citizens lined up at elementary schools and community centers across the nation Monday for government-mandated fingerprinting. “I’m not exactly sure what this is all about,” said Ft. Smith, AR, resident Meredith Lovell while waiting in line. “But given all the crazy stuff that’s going on these days, I’m sure the government has a very good reason.” Said Amos Hawkins, a Rockford, IL, delivery driver: “I guess this is another thing they have to do to ensure our freedom.”
I'd be very wary about such specific surveys, because they're often very much not conducted in a scientifically responsible manner, and based on actual studies across the spectrum of political issues there's basically no alignment between public opinion/preferences and actual policymaking in the US.
Could this be the one exceptional case where people agree with the direction of policymaking? Sure. Is that likely? No, not really.
What does democracy have to do with electronic encryption? Democracy existed before computers.
There are legitimate reasons for governments to intercept information, with the correct oversight -- enforced legally in an "checks and balances" manner. The fact that there is a breakdown of trust between government and people won't be solved with more encryption.
A core tenet of Truecrypt + Veracrypt (developer guarantee) has always been no backdoors, even if requested by government.
If in a democratic society, the majority agrees that government should have backdoors (with the correct oversight). Then it follows that Veracrypt should be illegal as its use is not in alignment with the will of the majority.
I personally don't agree with the majority here but can you fault the logic?
Most forms of democracy do not have a direct correspondence between "the will of the people" and the actual policies enacted. As another poster mentioned, tyranny of the majority is a thing, and robust democracies have evolved institutions to deal with it. Otherwise there's nothing stopping the majority from periodically voting the minority off the island, Survivor style, until only a single dictator remains.
In the U.S. in particular, there's strong respect for individual rights enshrined in the Constitution, and a key role of the judicial branch is ensuring that those rights are respected regardless of what the majority thinks. The majority cannot enslave the minority, for example, regardless of what the legislature votes. Nor can it deprive it of speech or free assembly, or guns, or a right to trial by jury.
What's the improved security argument for terminating VeraCrypt's account though? SB does have clear benefits but what is unclear is the motivation for the account termination.
What's the likelihood that this account ban provides zero security benefit to users and was instead a requirement from the gov because Veracrypt was too hard to crack/bypass.
Community control typically doesn't work to constrain great men, a group has more weak points than an individual (look for example how easily Sam dismantled the OpenAI board decision by applying the right pressure).
The greatest and often only check on power has always been competition or opposition by other great men.
Not great men. People with "perceived" high networth. Banks will fall over backwards to loan them money. See Chase and Musk. Let's not associate perceived networth with "great"
Bitcoin has had significant protocol upgrades before, including the highly divisive segwit. IMO immutability is a non-issue, there's plenty of evidence that Satoshi generally agreed that consensus via the longest chain (most PoW) wins.
Thus, upgrading the protocol/code to change the encryption to something quantum-resistant should be no more controversial a change than segwit. The community has already answered the "is it still Bitcoin". Yes it is, protocol and code is free to change given longest-chain consensus.
The problem will be what to do with legacy addresses. Never before have issued coins been forcibly deleted by a BIP. It could turn out that legacy addresses (including Satoshi's) that fail to have their coins moved after a deadline must be considered compromised and burned/destroyed. That has no precedent with bitcoin, although it does with ETH.
Anyone know if there's a way out that doesn't require this? Obviously there's no way to ensure all legacy address coins are moved by the deadline.
I looked into it and the currently leading proposal: Hourglass v2 is pretty clever. Once 'Hourglass' is enabled, the rate at which legacy (P2PK) coins can be spent is (proposed to be) capped at 1btc / block. Thus they will not be burned, but the rate at which they can be stolen/compromised will be limited such that the economic impact is at most about 1/3 the block reward.
This gives holders of those old addresses the maximum amount of time to move their coins to more modern addresses and still the ability to move some coins after the deadline. If legacy keys are compromised in bulk, IE access to sufficiently powerful quantum computing is rapid and widespread, then there will be high competition via the existing txn fee bidding process for that 1btc/block slot. Thus most of the value of the will be captured by the txn fee and go to the miners, effectively boosting the mining reward by ~1/3.
Doesn’t this effectively still destroy all legacy wallets? Once the throttling limit goes into effect, it will be impossible for holders of legacy wallets to transfer their bitcoin without paying ~1 bitcoin per bitcoin they want to move. Doesn’t this amount to the same thing as abolishing all legacy wallets plus increasing the mining reward with extra steps?
Not necessarily, we could reach a point where theoretically it is possible to crack elliptic curve but still prohibitively expensive except for nation states. At that point or near that point, miners would likely agree to engage the throttle.
Presumably the vast majority who had their key would move the coins before the throttling takes effect so in the event of a 'slow takeoff' quantum scenario where quantum computing is expensive or nation states don't want to divulge the capability there could be no demand for the 1btc slot. If a lucky individual forgot about their coins (likely an early 50btc block), it only takes them ~8hrs to transfer at the normal txn fee.
Only those with access to legacy coins can compete for that slot.
The main advantage is it delays the transfer to the mining reward to the last possible moment, IE the trigger for the transfer to the mining reward likely only happens if there is sufficient contention for that 1btc slot because legacy wallets are getting cracked.
> Anyone know if there's a way out that doesn't require this?
Honestly, I see this as a way for the powers that be to force explicit KYC. You want those coins? You prove they're yours, you stick your name on that wallet and all the liability that comes along with it. Otherwise the government (some government) holds onto them until you can definitively prove they're yours. I dont think this scenario is likely, but I can see it being something that is proposed or tried.
At current launch numbers it may not be worth 1.5+ trillion but valuations aren't about current, they're about discounted future cash flows.
It seems logical that there could/will be far more demand for launch if the price were lower. Prices are quite extreme currently, a standard 3U cubesat (loaf of bread size) is $300k and that's just for orbit.
There could be lots of startups that want to try robotic space mining but launch costs just make that mostly impossible currently so there are only a select few. It's like valuing the Dutch East India company based on the trade volumes in 1603. Of course people are not going to be buying much pepper or nutmeg if it costs them weeks of labor, but build lots of reusable ships, and with each voyage, more people can afford your pepper and nutmeg until it's a common household item.
discounted future cash flows is discounted by risk. There is a lot of risk on growing future revenue is the point.
>seems logical that there could/will be far more demand for launch if the price were lower.
This thesis hasn't played out much in the 10 years since Falcon landed in first 2015.
The non Starlink component of revenue has not massively grown beyond what size the market in 2015 to today. SpaceX isn't lowering launch price to induce demand beyond out being the cheapest just by enough, they would be going lower if cost was the only barrier for more revenue.
It not that businesses aren't possible there at lower launch prices. Starlink is testament that it is.
The problem is that rest of the world is not able to innovate fast enough to take advantage of it even after 10 years. The industry struggles with things like manufacturing satellites at scale or raising money for it, or executing on innovation etc.
What that means for SpaceX is that even if launch costs are cheaper than now, the launch market simply may not grow quick enough for the valuation number to make sense. They would need to enter a lot of new markets directly and be their own launch customer beyond Starlink. This comes with its own set of execution, regulatory and other risks. The data-center[1] in space play is an attempt to do this.
Either DC play or something else, they will need to find and sustain a large business to grow, maybe they will, maybe not.
It is not very clear now and that is a lot of risk so any future cash flow projection has to be discounted heavily.
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[1] I am not qualified to comment on the technical feasibility, however to analyze the company finances that is not needed, it is just one more risk factor, depending on how you feel you can assign 0 or 1 or anything in between.
> This thesis hasn't played out much in the 10 years since Falcon landed in first 2015.
It did play out: there are many more launches today, it's 5x in 20 years. The 75% of SpaceX starlink launches (which account for nearly 50% of all launches) were quietly financed by their other launch customers, exactly because the real cost to launch dropped so much.
That doesn't mean you're wrong, but you do seem to forget that SpaceX, as its own customer, knows the number of launches is going to rise exponentially. They obviously choose to manufacture for where the market _will be_, while you don't see the market before its there. Which is good for them.
There are enough Elon haters that you can rest assured there will be an inverse ETF so that you can easily hedge away your index exposure if you really want to.
It's kind of sad that we've become so risk averse. Risks should be fully disclosed but let the adventurers adventure.
Would Columbus' ship ever have been allowed to sail in the modern day? Proximity wingsuit flying and free-climbing is legal and people choose to do it even though the probability of death is extremely high. Spaceflight is significantly safer and far more beneficial to humanity, yet we block it. No one counts the lives lost due to slowing scientific progress but we should. How much further behind would we be scientifically if Darwin hadn't ventured out on the Beagle due to endless safety reviews. Would the US be what it is today if Lewis and Clark had to prove to congress that the trip was safe?
Given the opportunity, many of us would choose to die as part of a grand adventure in service to humanity vs. wither away of old age.
I wish I could downvote this comment more than once. It's incredibly ghoulish to use the perfectly-sensible argument that modern culture is too risk-averse to handwave away known critical safety problems. Those two things are completely orthogonal. Yes, astronauts should be willing to accept that there are "unknown unknowns" and that they will be facing some amount of unquantifiable risk, and they should be celebrated for this. That does not, not at all, mean that when a mission comes back with heat shield failures we know should not have happened, and multiple Inspector-General reports say the ship is not safe, those concerns should be blown off with rambling about Charles Darwin. That's pure insanity.
Or to put it another way, if you were the manager on the day of the Challenger launch issuing the "go" command over the objections of the Thiokol engineers saying it was unsafe to launch in below-freezing temperatures, would you have done so with paeans to Christopher Columbus? That's the sense I get from your post.
>Camarda is an outlier. The engineers at NASA believe it is safe. The astronauts believe it is safe. Former astronaut Danny Olivas was initially skeptical of the heat shield but came around.
How do you explain so many people believing it is safe?
The problem is risks are far too easy to brainstorm, anyone can come up with endless risks that it takes endless time to mitigate.
If I were the manager for challenger, I would have run the o-ring experiment as soon as it was brought up as a concern. Put the fuel pumps in a freezer, test if they leak. Feynman famously demonstrated it with a glass of icewater. Experiment is what separates made up risks from real risks, I would have definitely told the engineers to take a hike and would have hit launch if they couldn't provide experimental evidence of o-ring failure in cold temps. (Spoiler alert: in that case they easily could have)
No. That famous demonstration only touched on the real failure mode--the rings were covering up other failure and in the cold could not do so.
The real test was creating a full-scale test of ignition, an engine containing mostly inert filler (to occupy the fuel volume) and just enough fuel to reach stable burning.
> How do you explain so many people believing it is safe?
The article itself answers this question: institutional incentives leading to heavy social pressure to agree with the groupthink and declare something is safe when it is not. And we know that the scenario it lays out is highly possible, because it has already destroyed two Space Shuttles. Now that this has happened twice, the burden of proof is on the people saying it's not happening again, especially when the OIG's report directly contradicted what NASA had been saying about the heat shield up to that point (indicating they were lying and had to hastily retcon their story).
>the burden of proof is on the people saying it's not happening again
This specifically I take issue with. You had a bug in your software before so now the burden is on you to formally prove your software is bug-free.
The burden of proof should remain on the naysayers. Take a plasma torch to the heatshield pock marks and see how long it takes to burn through. Do experiments just as Feynman did with the o-rings. Let the outcome of the experiment, not office politics decide.
1) you have an established pattern of behavior of ignoring safety concerns (Challenger, Columbia), and
2) people are alleging that you are doing the same thing now, with independent auditing from the OIG backing them up,
that's sufficient to shift the burden of proof back onto you.
Your attempt at a gotcha with the heatshield is just ridiculous: everyone already agrees the heatshield works in small-scale testing. That's the entire problem! It failed on the actual mission and NASA couldn't explain why, so instead they pivoted to trying to explain why the failures don't matter.
(EDIT: As an addendum, I'll also add that you don't even need to go back to Columbia to find an example of NASA lying about safety to protect reputations. Remember when they insisted for months that the Starliner mission was going just fine, and then eventually they said the astronauts weren't coming back on it, and then it landed and the final report was that there multiple failures leaving it on the knife edge of total catastrophe? And remember how that was less than two years ago? You're a maniac if you take the safety claims of this organization at face value)
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