Gotcha. The term “Mining Difficulty” threw me off.
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It may just be another pullback. But this one does seem to have lingered longer than the others. There will be a point where a lot of people give up on “the dream” and start to just shut down their farms. Maybe it’s that time.
My belief (admittedly without much hard evidence) is that the massive netspace growth has primarily been driven by cloud farmers, and the margins for cloud farming just don’t work with the coin around 400USD. Not sure a cloud farmer wants to hodl either, they want/need to pay their next hosting bill (and ideally make a profit).
The nature of Chia did seem like it would be quite difficult/costly to be reactive, but with faster plotting you might see people with cloud farms trying to scale with the coin price.
All good things for small-medium on-prem farms IMO, I am pretty much gambling on this happening eventually (growth slowing or reversing).
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Also maybe this?
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Well, I’m calling it, netspace growth is slowing down!
The universe might prove me wrong tomorrow when I wake up, but at least I’ll feel good about it going to sleep 
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And then it jumps almost a full EiB overnight. Just ridiculous.
True, but it’s still lower than I would have expected it to be, based on the previous rises and falls.
I’m reserving judgement until it’s much less subjective - but I’m slightly optimistic that the curve may be flattening. Or maybe just hopeful 
Here is a quick trend line on the graph from chiaexplorer.com. Ignore the 20 degree indicator. I was just using the ruler as a straight line. But you can see that even with the bumps, it is slowing. We’ll see if that continues.
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yeah we’ll have to wait and see but does look to be cooling down a bit.
If i go by numbers on reported on the other pages or chiastatus, then tuesday afternoon it was 23.6
now almost 3.5 days later, at 24,6 so that’s “only” like 300PB/day!
Long into this thread, back to it’s beginning only 30 days ago. 
So now we are over 25 Eib and still climbing at a slightly lower rate.
The only thing that will slow network growth is a further decline in the value of XCH.
If the price continues to decline the farming whales with large investment are going to have to cut their losses.
If the price goes back up, then the net space will continue to grow until the whales choke themselves with their immense, combined proof of time and space.
Sound a bit like a prophet above, lol! This is what I was thinking, anywaze …
I think whales with on-prem have no real reason to cut losses - I wouldn’t consider myself a whale by any stretch of the imagination, but for me it’s a sunk cost, if the ROI takes longer than I planned then it takes longer - the cost of power is not significant compared to PoW, and there would only be a significant ongoing cost if I intended to match network growth rate forever. Eventually I’ll just stop growing my space, maybe move the system into the garage and just let it run.
Cloud whales, another story though.
Anyone who has staff, rent, and most importantly, a credit line and/or large investment in storage must make a profit before they can continue to expand.
I believe we are rapidly approaching the point where it is not profitable to buy more storage with the reduced reward and income.
Oh yeah, I agree a lot of people must be rethinking any expansion plans.
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Not me. I can get storage at $19 a TB, and ROI in 6 months. If it sinks to even $200, it will be paid back after a year. I am not in this for the quick buck.
Now, for cloud storage users, this was profitable at $1600… Now its not. Hopefully they jump ship.
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What if it continues to drop $100 every week as it has been. Where is your profit if XCH is worth under $100?
Do you have staff or rent? A credit line spent on HDDs and high end plotters?
I’m still going to play for a year personally, because that’s what I budgeted for.
Yep … I’m still in and hope for better … it’s a fun hobby if nothing else. I still have 100TB to plot, lolz!
I read this and though, nah not that fast ROI mate…few calculations later…hmmm Chia ain’t that bad.
(don’t tell the people who are leaving 
)
I’ve paid a bit more per TB on average (23/TB) but still, numbers are ok if you look longer term
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I take that back. I just recalculated. I am making $2.44 a month per TB. So that would be 8 months. Still. Everything after that is profit