most miners dont pay their costs weekly/monthly
This is of course true and your remarks about energy credits are interesting (although nothing new for me, I had analyzed the Riot case for another purpose). But the decisions to invest or disinvest are taken all the time. And the halving event was an event that for sure all serious mining companies would have taken into account previous to the business decisions they took in, roughly, from late 2023 on.I had for example expected that some mining companies would have simply given up after the halving. They might have estimated their efficiency in comparison to other companies already before the halving and then decided if they buy their energy credits/hardware or not.
My expectation was also not a 30% drop like some other forum users expected, but something closer to 10%
The 2-3% drop has also to be compared with the Moore's Law-adjusted hashrate/diff growth, so it might be actually a bit deeper (4-5%, without having done an exhaustive calculation).what you also have to account for is when the hashrate drops by x% due to home hobby miners switching to altcoin or switching off asics due to lack of profit. this causes them to see that its cheaper to buy coin rather then mine it, which helps the market price support the new higher price points (above $50k instead of above $25k)
also those mining farms that can afford to continue and have planned the halving, see that the competing hobby miners have gone which means the share of sats per block give more sats per block to those that remain. and an opportunity for those that remain to then add a few more asics to the pool to take up the hashpower that the hobby miners left. this then causes the hashpower to recover quickly and now the remaining miners have more sats per block thus more profitable