Compressed public keys are 66 hex characters. Uncompressed are 130 hex characters. Using compressed keys saves space in the block chain because the transaction size is smaller and potentially would reduce the transaction fee which is calculated by transaction size in the reference bitcoin implementation.

There is no downside.

I believe the halfing will have strong impact and I think you answered your own question (why?) at least partly: a lot of coins are immobile.

You're looking at inflation rate. Let me offer another way to look at this:

(I'm assuming miners are selling 100% of mined coins for simplicity, the argument works with less)

3600 BTC are mined each day. At current market price that's $900,000 worth. These BTC are being bought every day by demand. Now this selling pressure halves and the demand stays the same. Surely what will happen is the price will rise. In case of constant demand of $900k/day it should rise to 500 USD/BTC (merely double). But neither supply nor demand stay constant in such a scenario: supply is likely to decrease, because miners get to hoard more and most importantly demand will rise. Yes, I know, economic theory says demand should drop with a higher price,... but that's forgetting human psychology and the hype a 100% price rise will cause. In other words: the halving (reduction of supply) itself is just the ignition, the real momentum comes from increase of supply.

It worked last time, I think the Q1 2013 rally was caused (or at least substantially contributed to) by the halfing.

Does this make sense at all or is it wishful thinking?

Has anybody noticed CVE-2014-6342?  
http://www.symantec.com/security_response/vulnerability.jsp?bid=70341

Many hosts are now actively blocking bitaddress.org.html. 

It seems that our method of stuffing a png file in a webpage is no longer compliant.  Is there a branch out there that uses a different style?  

And what exactly is bitcoin 'backed' by? Coins and fiat are backed by physical governments and militia.    People can protest and throw rocks at politicians when shtf. You can't throw rocks online at miners maintaining the blockchains, or rogue exchange owners known only by internet screennames.

Are you assuming the masses will just put all their 'faith' into a non-reversible, non transparent system backed by anonymous neckbeards should the world crumble?

Sounds legit.

You're complicating what should be a simple issue.  Resources are exchanged to benefit both transacting parties.  You're assuming people find Bitcoin valuable as opposed to food, shelter, visa cards, beanie babies, whatever.  Metals are more useful than Bitcoins in some circumstances.  Not so in others.  Same applies to credit cards, and so on.

Under what realistic circumstances would Bitcoin "preserve some semblance of a global economy"?

Then precious metals and housing secondly, as they will always maintain 'some' intrinsic value.  

Trust me, in a true SHTF scenario, NOBODY is going to want or care for bitcoin.  They're going to want food, shelter, clothing, and nationally recognized currency that will be accepted anywhere with historical usage that extends back thousands of years: silver and gold.

Personally, I think this is the most likely scenario as well. ATM bitcoin is like a very risky commodity.  Things would have to get really really ugly (like breaking some major rules thereby breaking trust in traditional systems) for bitcoin to become a 'safe haven' in case of a financial crash.  
Five or ten years from now, that might be a different story.

I'm not sure what you're saying is he a government Trojan or an unsuspecting Bitcoin Trojan for government?

When BTC starts taking bigger chunks out of fiat currencies, gold and bonds, you'll see quite a bit more than $2300 in 2020...

I think they are not bullish enough. My long term prediction is that all government currencies will be swallowed by bitcoin as none will be able to compete. The dollar and all others will go the way of the Zimbabwe dollar.


Heh. Yeah, weird when a price-per-bitcoin target in a research report about bitcoin-vs-gold gets people in *this* thread to say "uhhh....that's just too bullish". Myself included.

FYI, Mycelium's development roadmap is

1) Implement HD wallets (about 95%+ done, and works fine in testnet Dev build, but still need to update LocalTrader and other minor things to work with it)
2) Move the entire infrastructure to Tor, meaning our nodes will be run as hidden servers, only accessible through Tor, and Mycelium Wallet will have Tor built in (hopefully this won't cause problems in blocked countries, like China or Iran)
3) Implement CoinJoin, using our nodes that are used for address lookup and broadcasts, to collect and broadcast mixing requests. Likely enable this as a default feature. We'll have to figure out if we'll need to follow the DarkWallet model of letting some users leave their coins to mix, or if we have enough transaction volume to do it on the fly. Maybe we'll even link with DarkWallet servers, and use the people looking to mix there.

Some links from reddit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDGUUtDqNV0
Coinshuffle: Trustless, Peer-to-Peer Bitcoin Mixing


Links:
Demos
http://shuffle.devbtc.com
http://simulator.devbtc.com
Github
https://github.com/bryanvu/coinshuffle-server
https://github.com/bryanvu/coinshuffle-sim
https://github.com/bryanvu/bitcoinjslib-wallet

must listen podcast of Robert Murphy by Tom Woods on Bitcoin and the Regression Theorum.  it's a little past halfway in the podcast:

http://www.schiffradio.com/pg/jsp/verticals/archive.jsp

Murphy's Conclusions:

1.  Bitcoin is unique in that it was developed from the start to be a form of money and did not evolve as a commodity.
2.  Bitcoin leapfrogged the barter phase whereby it would have established it's own relative value (intrinsic value) as a commodity in the market place against other items prior to becoming a medium of exchange.
3.  the Regression Theorum is too restrictive as it could not have predicted something as innovative as Bitcoin.

i extend his conclusions to say the Jeffrey Tucker's theory that Bitcoin only has value primarily b/c of it's payment network to be wrong.  Woods alludes to Tucker's theory in the interview but clearly disagrees with it.  Woods makes the correct argument that the reason ppl value the payment network is b/c the Bitcoin currency has value to begin with.  IOW, the payment network would be worthless if Bitcoin the currency was worthless.  this is where Andreas is also wrong when he says Bitcoin the currency is merely the 1st app existing on what is the real value, the blockchain and that they can be separated.  same argument as Tucker's, same wrong conclusion.

also by extension, Konrad Graf's theory that the RT is consistent with Bitcoin's origin is also tenuous, if not wrong, altho not quite as aggregious in its conclusions as Tucker and Andreas.  as far as i'm concerned, Mises is a great economist who was right on just about all things except for the fact that his RT did not, and could not, have been expected to have predicted something like Bitcoin which depends on the Internet and a scale of global communication never before seen in human history.

my final conclusion is the same one i've had since i started with Bitcoin back in 2011, and that is that Bitcoin the currency is inextricably linked to Bitcoin the blockchain and Bitcoin the payment network. 

Is that what you mean? Not everyone has a lot of cash to buy bitcoins. Instead they have funds locked into tax shelters and a Bitcoin ETF might be a good option.