As this continues, it will take longer and longer to pay off an ASIC and miners will be forced to liquidate a larger perecentage of the 3600 daily BTC to cover their expenses.
Miners speculatively holding Bitcoins is not the usual state of things. They are a business, and soon they will have extremely tight margins like in the past. I give it 1 or 2 more doublings of the difficulty.
Any ideas what is the cause of Dec'12 sudden drop ? Right after that drop, the 2013 rally began. I wonder if there is a relation between those two events and whether this could happen again now.