The hashrate will continue to decline leading to a drop in difficulty.
Unless the community wakes up and starts to give at least 50% of its effort in integrating Bitcoin into payroll systems, we're going to see Bitcoin slowly fade away into the night. The only way to equalize the downward price pressure caused by the growth of BTC accepting merchants, is to pay people in Bitcoin.
No way. Even if the price continues to drop, newer hardware with higher efficiency is going to come on the market and increase the difficulty. I think Q1 2015 was slated to be the time for the release of the next gen ASICs.