It's not the end of bitcoin, because when the rigs ( take the s-9 as a base ), go for $10, people in china will buy them as space-heaters, and the accept the cost of electricity, and buy them for the added good of winning the lotto.
My fear is that new software will be deployed for mining only, and nobody will be running full servers to process transactions, thus BTC will be in deep shit, cuz the tx rate will go from bad to worse.
That won't happen. Miners have strong incentive to maximize transaction fees, especially as the block subsidy drops to 6.25 BTC and so on. Rationally, they'll work to fit as much transaction data as they possibly can into every block.
Remember an ASIC miner doesn't need a hard-disk ( full block chain ) it just needs to call home and get work and send back a hash that is led by 'N zeros'.
Now that running a full-node doesn't make you money because mining is dead, ...what's the point.
Miners may not need an archival node, but they need to run a full node. If they skip verification of the previous block, they risk publishing invalid blocks on top. That's what happened
here -- a very costly mistake!