I am new to bitcoin and still learning, but if ASICS make the difficulty too high for the average miner, and mining becomes the domain of large enterprises, could people lose interest (since they cant mine and earn their own btc) and lower the demand?
OTOH, if the average miner moves to mining LTC (or another crypto), they still need to convert to BTC to get any use out of them, because BTC is much more widely accepted.
you can exchange LTC (and most other alt coins) for fiat.