when all bitcoins are mined, will fees be enough to keep mining?

[vite]

And once the bitcoins are all mined, will the difficulty reduce because it will not be profitable to mine just for fees.

[Raoul Duke]

Define profitable, please.
Mining just for the sake of having a functional secure Bitcoin network isn't a profit by itself?

[HDSolar]

This is an interesting post from the perspective that I would say difficulty would stay at the highest level acchived when the last coin is mined.  As for mining for fees I don't understand that statement so if a little more can be offered up maybe that might give everyone some more feedback.  I would thinkd that mining would not be of value for bitcoin once the last coin is mined.

[Lethn]

Define profitable, please.
Mining just for the sake of having a functional secure Bitcoin network isn't a profit by itself?

I think mining for profit is completely pointless, I expect there will be a lot of people who will use their gaming rigs to mine for fun and that's it really, I've been looking at a lot of these miners who claim to be profitable but you can see that they're usually doing it through questionable means like siphoning off electricity from places they work at etc.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing though, whoever Satoshi is, they are a very clever person who has clearly though ahead on everything and made this difficulty to ensure that no one person or group could easily obtain a lot of rigs just by building ASIC's or anything like that so like with normal fiat currencies you can't have one group suddenly deciding to flood the market with more currency.

[AndrewBUD]

wont most of us be dead by then?

[cunicula]

wont most of us be dead by then?

LOL, I guess that is the idea. But if bitcoin dies then, who do we sell the coins to? Last one holding is a sucker. 

[vite]

If the cost of the mining operation is less than the revenue from that operation than there is profit.

If there are no miners, then no transactions will take place within the network.

If there are no more coins to mine and only live from fees then:
1. What will keep miners from imposing high fees.
2. How many people will stay with bitcoins if miners impose high fees

[SAC]

If the cost of the mining operation is less than the revenue from that operation than there is profit.

If there are no miners, then no transactions will take place within the network.

If there are no more coins to mine and only live from fees then:
1. What will keep miners from imposing high fees.
2. How many people will stay with bitcoins if miners impose high fees

Miners would not impose high fees. The only way this btc thing can work as it is presented, the world run on btc, is if a single coin is worth tens of millions of dollars equivalent of real world economic output. A tiny fee in that instance can be worth hundreds or even thousands of dollars.

[cunicula]

If the cost of the mining operation is less than the revenue from that operation than there is profit.

If there are no miners, then no transactions will take place within the network.

If there are no more coins to mine and only live from fees then:
1. What will keep miners from imposing high fees.
2. How many people will stay with bitcoins if miners impose high fees

This is far in the future, so there is no need to plan for this eventuality. The developers will think of something...

If you didn't buy that, how about this...

Limit the network to a small number of transactions so that fees will always be high.
Without this artificial scarcity, there is no guarantee that high fees for miners can be extracted.  

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/13jj0d/in_favor_of_not_increasing_the_block_size/

The developers are all behind this idea. BitPal, here we come!

http://bitcoinstats.com/irc/bitcoin-dev/logs/2012/11/21

If you didn't buy that, they suggest charitable donations to miners, assurance contracts, and also claim to have some other vague ideas that will help.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2700 (see discussion from here onwards in this thread)

If you absolutely refuse to swallow the blue pill, here is the red one:

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Proof_of_Stake