I’d agree, to my mind highly improbable.
A mix of both scenarios is probably more likely.
This doesn’t look like anything has slowed. Just continuing… So I would not jump to the conclusion this is any type of ‘storm’.
To me it looks like the blockchain is being used, as it should, and hopefully continues into the future and, indeed, increases in intensity greatly as time goes on. Transactions are the lifeblood of a strong and vibrant blockchain IMO. I’ve read that out blockchain is not being used anywhere near its capacity, so it can take significantly more use.
Any issues nodes are having, and perhaps going offline, going forward are due - at least in part, to (to the falsely held) belief that minimal spec nodes will ‘be ok’ and are ‘just waiting for it to stop’.
Just my opinion, but robust higher performance nodes are the future that Chia needs and deserves to service blockchain users, regardless of the hype that micro nodes are fine. At a minimum, low power nodes will become higher performance as new tech takes hold as it does continually. Sixteen core Pi’s anyone 
?
Make it 3 months, will look the same. It is more or less a constant process that runs around 300 level for the past over 2 months. It is not normal behavior.
Sure, but that drop looks far from natural to me.
Of course ppl will interpret it differently.
Agreed on that. It is a form of a constant low load dust storm that stops from time to time, and transactions go to normal level (before Feb).
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What is ‘normal’ and why is that amt ‘not normal’?. I have no idea at all what it should be, but why do you judge it isn’t?
If you recall those charts from before Feb, the flow was steady averaging 20 or so. Early dust storms (Nov, Dec) were short, and were pushing loads to 20k or so for a day or two. This one is a constant load around 300, and when it drops off, it is still what it was before Feb - just fluctuating steadily around 20 having little spikes or drops here and there.
I also agree that nodes are the key part of Chia network. As such, my take is that nodes should be also earning some XCH. Sure, not the same way as harvesting, but one could image metrics like uptime, connected peers, uploaded data as parameters influencing node earnings. Those parameters could influence what H/W people would use for their boxes. This would also let setups like RPis to run their farms potentially node-less (a similar model to Flex Farmer). As it is right now, the optics is just through one hammer that Chia bought early on, and kind of refuses to also buy a screwdriver.
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You are aware that with other coins, you have to buy a “node license” and get some coin each x blocks in return with diminishing returns over time?
Probably the falling node count could be related to the new light wallet which doesn’t require a own node to be running and synced?
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That would imply shutting down farms, what basically nodes represent. I would assume that people have light wallets in addition to their farms / nodes.
Not accurate, as @juppin said, a node is not necessarily a farm. A node is a node and in some cases that is all it is. You can run a node without any plots. So node count does not directly relate to netspace. For example, I run two nodes but I only have one farm. I run the second one just to have a current backup database if needed. As a side effect, I contribute another node to the system. I’m sure pure nodes are rare, but saying all nodes are farms is just not accurate.
I get what you are saying, but wouldn’t the system have a way to filter that out, because a node without plots behaves differently from a node with plots.
Why would plots matter, a node just needs to transmit transactions to be a usefull node.
I’m sure they could tell the difference, but I don’t know of anywhere they are showing farm count vs node count. They just have node count and netspace. Realistically, like @Bones says, they don’t care. For system stability node count is all that matters.
You are absolutely right. I also run a secondary node from time to time, and there are people that run a nodes instead of a just harvesters. However, for the sake of this discussion, @juppin also stated:
So, this discussion is not really a definition of a node, but rather our guesses of how to explain the dropping node count, and regardless how we define a node (one per farm, or a set per farm), this current drop is rather not related to people like you deciding not to run a backup, or like me starting and stopping mine from time to time, or those with multiple nodes / harvesters killing a single harvester / node, or using a wallet in addition to running their farms as normal.
Unless, we assume that people were running nodes purely as their wallets, and right now they are switching those nodes / wallets to light wallets. Although, in this case, the light wallet was introduced way earlier than those charts have data. At least, I would think that this would be rather a rare phenomenon.
That is also how the second part of my answer clarified my position.
Unless, the assumption is that when people start the new UI, they opt for the stand-alone wallet mode. I didn’t test it, but I think that would imply that wallet mode UI also starts a farmer that just became nodeless (farm is still farming, but node is not running). And this would explain the drop in nodes, but not in the net space (as it looks like is right now).
I converted the chia blockchain to new, doesn’t it also upgrade the Wallet DB, if not what needs to be done?
New wallet database is a seperate and very small file so you do not have to convert anything. 1.3.x will download it. If it does not, check wallet directory and delete sqlite file, restart chia.
Looking at Chia official stats page, about 5 hours ago, there was a jump in nodes by around 35k. Zooming in, it looks like that jump was instantaneous. Life doesn’t like square forms, so this makes all those results be questionable.
Also, I am monitoring that page for quite a bit, and so far China dropped by about 10k, US by 3k, etc. However, this jump is not reflected in node count for those countries (or any other, as far as I can tell), what makes it even more suspicious.
@huntingground any comments, explanation for that?