It will still be there in some form or another.... The easy days just seem to be numbered.
There's also no way to tell what the new platform will be ... despite everything I ponder in my head being just intentionally dumb'd down shitbox versions of an AH I still have hope. I hope they keep at least some way inside the game to accept / receive usd/eu w/o worrying about paypal scams. Thats really my biggest concern . Even without that $ will still be there... it will just be worse.
My biggest fear now is everything of value being BoA or so easy to obtain its worthless. This seems to be the path they are going down ... You wont need an AH because you can get it yourself if you play 20 hours, and you wont need to trade because its all bound! yay!.
At the moment my highest hope is they come out with a new platform that keeps the safety of the old AH's but loses efficiency in some way (less slots, or max usage, or something) or a trading post or personalized profile shops, etc. I also have hopes that there will be a HUGE emphasis on crafting / enchanting and it will have high gold/material costs which will make gold / material very valuable. At the very least this would provide a path to make money selling said gold/mats to 3rd party sites or running your own site, or spamming wts in forums.
I'm usually pretty damn optimistic but I never seen this coming ... i'll admit. Hopefully as we get closer to blizzcon we get some cool news and not more garbage. I dont think anyone on the planet wants to go back to WUW WUG d2 trading days ... so im curious to see how they will handle it.
p.s. If ladders release with RoS, then i hope to god they wait till march to announce it ... otherwise it really will be d3 Armageddon.