So They Tell Me The Stamp Market Is Crashing?

There were more collectors in the 1940s than in the 1890s, so of course there are plenty of 1940s stamps floating around. And the fact thar 10-12 times as many 231 printed as 19040s issues is irrelevant to the number of surviving copies. Collectors didn't buy 10 times as many 231 just because there were 10 times as many printed. Your claim of 50,000,000 surviving mint examples is still preposterous.

I do not disagree with your contention that there are still 98 quality 231s out there that have not been graded, but I don'y agree wit you on how many.

IF that were the ratio, then to have 14,000 still around, every single 98 would have had to have been saved mint by collectors and survived all this time.

All of the back and forth does point out one thing. Nobody can say with any amount of certainty that there are or are not more superb examples of many stamp issues extant. That alone nullifies any suggestion of graded stamps being any type of investment vehicle. Even one stamp which grades 100 added to the pool dilutes the value metrics.

Probably a couple orders of magnitude high.

Can anyone disprove that there are 50,000,000 copies in existence?

Of course not, unless you want to somehow scour the globe and count them all. It's just common sense - if there were that many of them around they'd literally be turning up in penny packets and people would be using them as postage. There's maybe a million active collectors in the US on a good day, there's no way there's 50 mint copies of that stamp in existence for every collector. That's not a rare stamp by any stretch of the imagination, but if there were that many around we'd practically be tripping over them.

It amazes me that people think that a stamp that has been popular since the day it was issued, has been common since the day it was issued, and has been cheap since the day it was issued would not still have a 3% population in mint condition. I mentioned this to a long time dealer the other day and his first thought was that there might be 20% left!! He decided later that that was too high a number, but found mine totally plausible. It still comes back to 1,464,588,750. And there were 6,244,719,500 of it's contemporary, #220 issued so it's not as if it was the only current 2 cent stamp.
Next people will be telling me how rare 210's are, since those quantities of 98 and 100 are also small. After all, there were only 4,320,000,000 issued.

And anyone who sees large lots every day is tripping over them.

Slightly off topic, but where would you get such a number from? I would wonder if there are more than 100,000 serious collectors. By serious I mean, that actual spend $50 a year on stamps, not just keeping three stamps in their draw because they are pretty.

Same place I get most of my statistics: out of my rectum. I've seen a lot of numbers floating around about how many collectors there are in the US, some as high as 10 million (which I think is WAY too high). Truth is nobody really knows how many there are. 100K "serious" collectors sounds reasonable enough, but I also think 500K to 1M more casual collectors isn't too unrealistic. I mostly picked the 1M number because it was easily divisible by 50 million. If we use the 100K number, that would mean there's 500 mint copies of that stamp per collector, a frankly ludicrous number. Most dealers would be sitting on thousands of them that they couldn't sell as collectibles and would probably be selling as postage instead. Not that I'd want to use 25 of them to frank a first class letter, but heck, I'd love to use a few for make-up rates if I could buy them at 2 cents each.

It might be remembered that there are plenty of collectors in other countries with at least some US material, 231 is one of the easiest 19th century mint stamps to obtain.

Your definition of a serious collector is someone who spends $50 a year?????

It's crashing and burning for junk stamps.

If you think the possibilities of 231 are ludicrous, I would hate to tell you how many examples of many stamps far less common are out there.

Not serious in the same way that a member of this forum or the APS is a serious collector. But that is a collector, not just a guy who has some Disney stamps because he thinks it is cool or the like. Some one who spends $50 a year is at least a casual collector. But a collector none the less. A potential buyer of a stamp.