Could it be that all these advance orders are raising the retail price of the miners, and the small guys' being priced out - that is, not being able to afford as much miners as they need - is being reflected in these steady difficulty drops?
Gear prices have dropped by a lot, and probability in fiat is 60% lower than it was back in February, it makes sense for gear prices to fall, a gear that used to cost 15k is now selling for 5k and below, they will still drop, it's just a matter of time, gear prices take some time to react to profitability drop, most of the big guys mine with S19 or the equivalent, so something in the 30-35w/th range.
at current prices, I don't see any reason for them to shut down or to stop deploying.
Let's run some simple math and try to be as realistic as possible.
Let's pretend all the big guys that make up the majority of the hashrate mine at 6 cents (3-4 cents for power, the rest for maintenance, employees, rent, etc), now since many of them will be getting the S19 XP while some of their gears is still the 17 series or the equivalent, let's use something in the middle of both and that would be 35w/th
So let's work with 100th for simplicity.
100th consumes 84kWh, at 6 cents that is $5 a day.
let's also assume that they will only stop hashing if they get to a negative number, or let's be generous and assume they will stop when their average 100th makes less than 50 cents.
1st scenario, difficulty unchanged:
BTC at 13k > they still make $ a 5.52$ - 5 = 0.52$ a day
BTC at 11.75k > they mine at a loss.
2nd the scenario, difficulty changes, price unchanged.
Diffuclty at 44t >5.52$ - 5 = 0.52$ a day (47% increase from the current figures)
Difficulty at 49t they mine at a loss.
At current figures, their heads are still above the water making $8 and paying $5 and thus netting $3 per 100th, but with that small income, it's pretty hard to expand, and even assuming the price will stop dropping (which does not seem to be the case) they can only endure about a 40% increase in difficulty, so that's only 100EH more, in other words, less than a million gears, there are hundreds of thousands in pre-orders waiting to be sent to the U.S, every dollar
BTC loses makes the room for new gears a lot smaller, there might come a point where some gears are already losing money before arriving at their locations.
Meanwhile, with the summer heat, I saw someone talking about some farms shutting down/ underclock in places like Texas, which could help bring the difficulty down a bit, at least a long side with many of the small miners who are shutting down because they pay a lot more than 6 cents and don't actually have a 30-35w/th.
My long-long term view on those large corporate miners is that most of them will be screwed, it's very unlikely that we can recover before Q3-Q4 of next year, we may stop dropping but we won't be putting any crazy high prices, and even after we recover, the next thing coming will be the halving, so difficult times ahead, not just for them, for everyone who is involved in mining, especially those who bought the top, like 15k per miner that now makes them a 100$ a month, stay strong fellow miners.