This is not a demand deposit. It's basically a bond. FRB is when the bank has obligations to pay right now, on demand an amount of money it has invested elsewhere. In case there is a run on the bank they would have to borrow money or liquidate investments. If it can't do this it would have to default on the promises to pay. This is a good reason to not ever accept demand deposits at par value on a free market.

With fiat money and a governmental guarantee that your deposit is safe, you might accept demand deposits at par, since the government can always print the money to cover your deposit. Bitcoins, however, can not be printed, and only a fool would accept demand deposits at a FRB at par value.

Here you go.

http://bitcoinsites.witcoin.com/p/t/gambling

Ok, I put in a ws2_32.dll from an xp-install in my bitcoin.exe directory, then it complained about ntdll.dll, and I put that in there, to no avail. I don't really feel like replacing a lot of dll's in my system from various sources.

I wonder if this is a build issue or if something changed in the code to make W2k obsolete. I might try to build it from source, but for now I'm just going back to 0.3.20.2

No more support for Microsoft's best OS?

bitcoin fails with something like "couldn't find freeaddrinfo in WS2_32.DLL"

Heh, I hope you're right

@creighto
Asserting logic does not make your argument logical. Every miner has a cost to generate a block at a certain difficulty, if this cost is more than 25BTC+fees they would be taking a loss after halving the reward. There is nothing that says that at least half the miners have costs less than that. You just make that claim, asserting that it somehow logically follows, without explaining your logic.

@ribuck
Price of BTC also went up a lot, increasing profit margins and drawing investment into hashing power. Halving the reward is indeed like increasing the difficulty by 100%, without having been driven there by market forces, but because it was time to do it.

It will probably sort itself out in the end, but the sorting out process could be very painful I'm afraid.

I think the main problem is the 2016 block retarget interval, which IMO is way too long.
The difficulty could possibly be halved at the same time as reward halves, but this alone would just cause blocks to be spit out twice the speed for a week with a 100% rise in difficulty and back to square one after that. (Simplified example assuming no changes in market conditions...)

My point is, that I would like to see difficulty track actual hash rate a lot closer, and I think this would mitigate potential problems coming from reward halving or big drops in the price of BTC.

So, at worst 50% of hashing is on free electricity or are just that profitable that they can take a 50% cut in revenue? Maybe.

What did you base your estimate on?

Halving the reward is the equivalent of having half the gold content in your ore disappearing over night. This will cause most miners to become unprofitable, so block generation could crawl to almost a halt, making the next 2016 blocks very long and painful.

I think the 2016 block interval for difficulty changes could cause big problems, not limited to times of reward change. Suppose the market tanks at the beginning of a new difficulty, causing 90% of the hashing power to quit - this would mean that it would take 20 weeks until difficulty was adjusted again, not good...

This is unless fees go up a lot or are already a major part of the reward for each block.

Is this correct reasoning?

Just because you see an event happening does not mean it won't cause major changes in a market if you are at a loss at what to do about it...
"Tomorrow God comes down and removes half the gold in your ore" is a smaller problem, since the security of transacting existing gold does not depend on miners to keep mining. Gold miners will resume when/if the gold price makes it profitable.

So I think there clearly is a problem. The solution to this problem should be pretty obvious and, I believe, technically easy to implement. It also should not be that big of a problem politically, but I would like first to see if people agree it is a problem, and comes up with the same solution.

Great TED video by the way.

ITT: Religious argument about rights.

Rights: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWiBt-pqp0E
Law: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPn84m1pvh4

There are a lot of people who, while not necessarily being big statists, just assume that the state is necessary and do not give it another thought. I sure didn't think about it before I found myself in discussions about the state with friends. After that it was just a question of knowing more economics and history before I was convinced that the state is not a public good but a public bad.

But yes, it is hard to convince anybody, especially if they believe that they owe something to the state because it gives them free 'education' or healthcare or whatever, and think that without the state people could not afford these things. I strongly believe that this is false and that everybody would be better off if we stopped believing in violence as a means to our ends.

What FreeMoney said.

Also, lots of free books, articles and talks to be found at mises.org.