The production rate of BTC does not depend on the number of miners as long as there's one miner (with zero miners no BTC is produced). A block is produced every 10 minutes by a computer that produces the smallest hash for a randomly arranged set of inputs (transactions and previous block's hash). This lowest hash serves as an identifier for that block and all input transactions are recorded on the new block with that hash and appended/linked in the chain. Currently, each mined block is associated with a miner reward of 6.25 BTC (I think) that's given to the computer which produced the lowest hash. It doesn't change if there are more/less miners in the network. So, there's no "dry season" just because the mining rate cut in half. There's just less energy being spent competing to generate the lowest hash and get block rewards. So, all the miners not running are failing to potentially earn money and the system is, theoretically, less decentralized, now.
The production rate of BTC does not depend on the number of miners as long as there's one miner (with zero miners no BTC is produced). A block is produced every 10 minutes by a computer that produces the smallest hash for a randomly arranged set of inputs (transactions and previous block's hash). This lowest hash serves as an identifier for that block and all input transactions are recorded on the new block with that hash and appended/linked in the chain. Currently, each mined block is associated with a miner reward of 6.25 BTC (I think) that's given to the computer which produced the lowest hash. It doesn't change if there are more/less miners in the network. So, there's no "dry season" just because the mining rate cut in half. There's just less energy being spent competing to generate the lowest hash and get block rewards. So, all the miners not running are failing to potentially earn money and the system is, theoretically, less decentralized, now.
But, there's no change to the rate of production.