Power used to be a significant cost in bitcoin mining, now it's hardware deprecation. If you don't mine for a month the difficulty will have gone up so much you will have lost out on 20% of your potential income. However, the way prices are going now, I think there will be less and less people investing in new mining hardware, so the difficulty rate will stop increasing as fast. This will go on to make it easier for people who already own mining hardware by reducing the deprecation rate, consequently taking the price pressure off bitcoin. That will be where the bottom forms, but how low does it have to go to get there? Who knows, 400 might hold, 340 is more likely, 270 very likely in my opinion.
That's true, although this is a process with high inertia - hash power put online today was probably paid for and ordered quite a while back. Also, some businesses have investor money to spend and they can expand keeping in mind the future price of bitcoin - not selling now.
I agree that this should all form a solid shortage of coins, once the panic cools down.
