Or miners-gone-speculators. The introduction of ASICs has created a situation where I feel that miners that aren't immediately profitable will find rising prices to be an excuse to continue mining when they otherwise may not have. While I'm certain many already do so, it's going to be more prominent as these miners will have a much less liquid market to sell their hardware into than GPU miners did.

You can offload a few hundered GPUs as the demand for them is in the millions. You probably can't offload a few hundered ASICs in the same amount of time, and given how quickly mining hardware is obsoleted now, that's an issue.