Just some things to add on to the current climate. From Vitalik:

As it turns out, with the change in the difficulty adjustment algorithm brought about in the last hardfork, the ice age will come very slowly indeed. Originally, the maximum amount by which the difficulty could adjust was 1/2048x, and so given a natural mining difficulty of ~2**45 (where it is now), after around block 3500000, it would go up faster than it goes down, and the protocol would quickly freeze. Now, difficulty can adjust down faster than that if the block time is slow enough, and so even after this point there is an equilibrium. At block 3.5m (1 year from now), we would have an equilibrium block time of 25s for 100k blocks (~1 month); then we would see 35s for 100k more blocks (now ~1.4 months); then ~55s for ~2.2 months, then ~95s for ~3.8 months, and so forth until we get ~655s for ~26 months (ie. slightly worse than bitcoin), and only after that does the protocol break because of the cap of ~99/2048 downward adjustment, and that final doom does not take place until 2021 (though it certainly gets very annoying by the second half of 2017).

When it gets irritating to mine. I expect miners who still want to be in Ethereum will switch their mining rigs to another coin. They'll then sell that coin to buy Ethereum. This should further help the supply / demand situation.

There is a full fledged exchange opening up in Dubai during 2017. With all the work going on in Dubai with Consensys, I expect Ethereum to get more attention in Dubai and the wider Gulf Arab / MENA region. There is a lot of hot money (and idle money looking for a place to go) in the MENA region, especially the Gulf Arab States and Dubai. Many business owners run their business from Dubai, even though the business is primarily based in other MENA countries (even India and Pakistani based businesses are run from an office in Dubai).