ufmace

What, exactly, is your contribution to this proposed mission to Mars? Far as I can tell, nobody at the core of your business has any knowledge or expertise in any kind of engineering. You don't seem to have any connection to any large amounts of money that would be needed to actually make a mission of this magnitude happen either. I can't see what you are adding to the idea at all, besides some PR fluff.

I believe we will go to Mars someday, but why should you and your organization have anything to do with it? What do you have besides some press releases and the belief that going to Mars would be really cool? Lots of people think that going to Mars would be cool, and press releases are cheap. What do you bring to the table?

Bringing the right people together can be an actual contribution. But in order to add value by bringing people together, you generally have to have an ongoing business relationship with both sides first. I don't think Mars-One has an ongoing relationship with anybody, aside from a couple of news sites, since they've never made anything but hype. I can just picture Lockheed and SpaceX snickering at them in the background.

I bet some SpaceX intern told them something like "Yeah, Falcon Heavy launches are projected to cost $X Million. If you manage to scrape together $X Million and a payload made by an actual aerospace company, we'll launch it. Now if you'll excuse me, I have some actual paying customers to get to."

And Lockheed did a feasibility study for them. Which is probably something that a couple of dedicated hobbyists could have slapped together in a few weeks. They probably did it more so they could name-drop Lockheed than for the actual data. Lockheed was probably happy enough to take their money for that, but doesn't really plan to actually do anything besides a feasibility study.

I'm most curious about the things that would encourage or discourage a small business owner who is less knowledgeable/enthusiastic about bitcoin from accepting them.

About how much time a week do you spend dealing with Bitcoin processing related issues? What was your worst week? What are the biggest pain points in accepting bitcoins right now? Training staff, integrating with existing POS systems, getting reliable conversions back to USD, something else?

I've thought for a while that there is a need for somebody to create a well-executed, hard to screw-up, system for small businesses to accept bitcoins for in-person transactions. As far as I can tell, nothing like that exists on the market today, and most businesses accepting BTC are mostly rolling their own solution, at a high cost in time for whoever is managing it. Would you buy such a system, if it was available?