After a brief, but relatively lengthy pause, the growth of the Chia netspace has resumed its frantic upward trend. It is still unclear what caused this almost day and a half long break, but I can promise you that the small farmers out there appreciated the reprieve.
By the looks of things the rate of growth continues to slow slightly, but only as a percentage of the total. The absolute growth of network continues at a staggering pace as 100s of petabytes are added to the network every day. It is worth noting that due to the nature of how the netspace is calculated as an inferred value of the number of VDFs submitted to the network, and this creates a situation where extremely fast growth, like we are seeing, will create more challenges per day due to lagging difficulty and thus appear as if the netspace is bigger than it is. I don’t think what we saw yesterday was a correction of that, but if the netspace really did slow then that process may have caught to some degree and gotten more accurate for a time.
This is all speculation based on having read the consensus documentation, but I do think it explains why these slowdowns are appearing.
