Bitcoin is all about decentralization and freedom. There would be nothing more antithetical to Bitcoin than a law that prohibits saving.

Totally disagree. At the point where bitcoins are not be mined sufficiently to offset the cost of propagating the network, mining fees will have to rise dramatically to offset the loss of block coin generation income. In order to keep a decentralized network, the fee increase could be such that the only way to keep Bitcoin viable is to increase the cap on total coins, otherwise the mining fee would be so high as to fldrive people away from using Bitcoin all together because it's just too expensive. Either way, your conclusion that there will never be a problem is not accurate at all. Bitcoin's Board can't even effectively decide how to manage the minor problem of the needed block size increase. It gives me very little faith they can be trusted to handle an even more dangerous issue such as this.

Yes, at some point, only fractions of a Bitcoin will be produced with every block. I wouldn't say mining is pointless. It's necessary to maintain the network. When block coins drop, mining fees will necessarily have to increase to keep people mining. In this sense, it is likely that fees will eventually be so expensive as to make Bitcoin unviable.

Recessions are normal. Collapses are not. I don't know if OP means "collapse" in the sense that things fall apart and destabilize the world because they can't be put back together, or if it simply means a depression like economy. Would you say the world economy "collapsed" in the 1930s? What about 2008?

This thread was originally about stock investments, but somehow morphed into exclusively being about crypto.

One thing that is interesting is to watch the Saudis and Iranians jockey for regional supremacy and use oil as a proxy front in their conflict. The longer they fight, the more damage they do to themselves.

Math is not idle talk. You are idle talk. Math is math. If you want to prove your point, take a projection and mathematically show why it is not accurate. Since you cannot do this, your further assertions that projections are idle talk is actually the only idle talk happening here.

Roughly 3600 btc mined every day, so no, the amount of lost coins every day isn't even close to comparable to the number of newly created coins.

At this point it wouldn't be a double dip. We've had enough growth for a long enough period of time for this to be classified as a new recession, were one to occur.

You make it sound like the taxpayers have a say in the matter. There was no referendum in 2008. Things were just done without much consideration of how politically popular the actions were.

Do you think they're actually related or just a coincidence? The only way I could think of them being related is if somehow the wallet problems severely restrict supply and drive up the price, but that seems unlikely.

Good call on that. I should have backed my chart out further. Pumps are always a concern of mine with any recent price spike. I guess I was hoping for any information that might be to the contrary in this case.

There are few things I am confident of when it comes to crypto, but Eth not reaching $50 this year is one of them.

Does anyone know anything about why Feathercoin more than  doubled in the last few days? I can't find any information about it so it just seems random, but a move that big shouldn't be. Sub 2000 sats three days ago, now trading over 5000, on no insignificant volume.

Price is a function of where supply meets demand though. The market is agnostic when it comes to whether countries are pumping at a loss or a profit; it just doesn't care. It would take either a supply drop or demand increase for the price to rise. If countries pump less or continue to pump and then store it instead of sending it to market, this should have an effect on price because it reduces available supply, but not simply because they've been pumping at a loss. That's where I don't follow what you're trying to say.

I have an tendency of pointing out when you're not making sense or fundamentally misunderstanding something you're proclaiming expertise in, which just happens to be the majority of the time. You've flip flopped yet again. Projections are well-founded, they're just idle talk; back and forth, back and forth. Here's an idea: before you engage in debate, figure out what you believe first. Then write things that support what you believe.

Once again, and see if you can follow it this time, a projection is not a prediction of what will happen. It is an mathematical extrapolation of an event based on all of the known information we have. When the information we have changes, the projections change. A prediction, by comparison, would be that a projection is either incorrect or correct based on unproven hypotheses or ideas, but the projection is merely an exercise in mathematics.

One thing I'm fairly certain of is that a $500 billion valuation on Aramco is way too low. WSJ talks about a 6-10 trillion dollar valuation, but concedes that with so much secrecy surrounding the company, it's hard to know. But even with the uncertainty, you're not even playing in the same ballpark.

http://blogs.wsj.com/numbers/behind-the-numbers-saudi-aramco-valuation-2164/

Yes, and I didn't bring it up initially because the main issue was how badly the chart itself was manipulated to fit the narrative the author wanted to tell, but with the rapidly aging baby boomer generation over the last 20 years and continuing forward, you would expect total employment percentage to start to drop because baby boomers are retiring out of the work force a lot faster than new workers are coming in. But like I said, this is a small issue compared to how badly the chart was manipulated, but another small way the conclusion the author is trying to draw is unfounded.

Haha, I have noticed a high correlation between conspiracy theorists and zerohedge readers. And they're undaunted by the fact that the doomsday prognostications never come true. No one remembers all the failed predictions when there's a brand new doomsday crisis to push every week.

It matters tremendously the size of the economy and the size of the debt in relation to the deficit in any one year. It's quite one thing to run a trillion dollar deficit when GDP is 5 trillion and another entirely to run one when GDP is 15 trillion. An economy of larger size can tolerate the deficit better.  Same for debt, if current debt is 5 trillion, the country can handle he deficit much better than is the debt is already 19 trillion. All three of these things must be taken into account at the same time.