Are, perhaps, many small farmers turning off their PCs for the weekend?
Something else?
I’m going to guess it’s related to the price of XCH.
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That is partly me…! Checked my farmer today and my PSU has failed at some point in the last 4 days…grrrr 
Let them turn off their rigs. Good for us. It lowers the estimated time to win 
I am sure as the price drops more and more farms will drop off the radar.
With XCH below $100 USD it costs more to farm than you earn.
Large farms with overhead on top of electricity are losing money. Many peeps are changing course as a result.
Longstanding rule of miners has been to mine the most profitable coin. At this point, Chia is no longer in the farming profitability race.
The only good news at this time is that netspace drops also cause difficulty to decrease thereby further increasing your chance of winning a block.
Bare subsistence farming should still be viable for many small farmers who do not have extra overhead, lolz!
Can we see your math on that?
All the math I’ve seen calculating running cost is well under $100 a coin to cover utilities.
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Just to cover utilities. What if you are a large corporate farmer with a building, staff, etc.
Overhead will kill you quickly and big money will shift quickly if they are losing money or even if they see more profitable places to put their capital.
Why continue throwing money at a low or no profit venture when it could be well used elsewhere?
Again, let’s see the math as opposed to an opinion.
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I guess, you need to be more specific. There are at least two cases. First, those that already have HDs, and the second, those that don’t.
Assuming that you already have one 10TB HD that you paid $200, that drive will make around $7 per month. The cost of electricity to run that drive is in the range of $1-2. Let’s add some server electricity cost to make it $2. That makes your drive earn $5 per month.
Saying that, it will take you 40 months to recover the drive cost, assuming that it didn’t die before that (those USB drives have just 2 years warranty).
So, if you have your farm already, there is no point of shutting it down, as with that $100 per XCH at some point you may recover your cost.
With that said, if you have your farm running, and you do believe in chia, you should not buy new drives, but rather spend your money on purchasing XCH directly.
On the other hand, if you need to start from scratch, get one box for your node, another for your plotter, I don’t think that would make sense to start a farm as it is today.
If we say that there is no point to purchase new drives when the price is that low, the next question is at which price point purchasing XCH will not make sense anymore.
One factor that I would also add is that for the past 2+ months, the netspace is contracting. What it means, there is no new blood in the ecosystem, as such there is not much enthusiasm behind chia. So, as several people stated already, if you have your farm, don’t shut it down, if you think about expanding, think again.
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Many of us did the calculations when Chia was at $150. It really comes down to your electricity cost if you have no other overhead. As the number is variable based on where you live and your electricity cost there is no way to come up with a definitive fixed cost for farming a block.
The cost starts becoming prohibitive for many once XCH drops below $100, not even counting overhead.
Feel free to read the extensive conversations on the matter.
I will offer this recent quote.
"MisterSavage
… Farming wise though, I have MANY empty drives that quite honestly I have no motivation to fill and farm right now. I always equate things. So for example, if I could run my GPU and ETH for 1 day and make what my drive could make in 30 days, it becomes a nonsensical exercise. Yes empty drives make no money but at the same time they are not using electricity. If I could go collect bottles for 1 hour and make what half of my drives make? I only mention this because it was bad around $150 but if it’s less than $100? I’m definitely into Chia but I’m not into wasting energy or making noise in my home. Selling some of my farming equipment is also another way of dealing with a sub-$100 Chia price. When you start talking pennies per TB I basically have the freedom to say GTFO."
That is just not true. I run the numbers assuming electricity price ranges in the other thread few days ago.
OK, so we are saying the same thing as to there being a variable electricity cost.
What did you work out the numbers to be for electricity cost per block won?
And when price rises again all those who quit or stop their farms will wish they hadn’t.
This is crypto, not for the weak or ppl who don’t consider future returns.
Farm and hodl, that’s my move anyhow, later, I’m pretty confident it’ll turn out for the best.
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Functional businesses cannot rely on faith or HODL. They have to turn a profit.
ok, but what does that translate into for cost per block won?
Tell that to all the large btc miners, they’ve been through it all many times and I’d bet will disagree with your sentiment, else they wouldn’t be miners by now.
Although, maybe with one twist. If you want to farm raptoreum, once you get your H/W, it takes you 20 mins to run it for the next year or more. I assume, it is the same for other POW coins. Therefore, there is a little resistance for new commers to join.
However, that is not the case for chia. Setting up your farm is not that easy process. I would argue that all the people that are farming right now are much more dedicated to make it work, than an average crypto miner is. To me, this is the main reason we see the net space contraction.
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Asics aren’t cheap, btc goes up, so does the cost of the asics, but ppl keep on buying and running them.
It’s those on older hardware that’s not as efficient that struggle and shut down farms.