The last few months of Chia have seen explosive growth, and then some jitter and then more explosive growth when it comes to the number of plots worked by farmers to secure the Chia Blockchain. Until now trying to plan out farmers has been a total crapshoot with no idea where the netspace would be next year, let alone next month.
Many people have made predictions. Many of them wrong. All of mine were wrong. But now it seems that, according to a couple of different angles, the netspace has finally levelled off. The number? About 32 EiB. For the last 2 weeks it has hovered around that number, with some fairly large swings in the estimate – but that’s just an estimate. It is built by averaging the quality of the proofs submitted to the network and analyzing them statistically to estimate how big that means the network is. This is imperfect and requires pretty stable difficulty to get right. But I think its starting to get there.
The other thing you can see is that the block rewards have petered down to around where they should be, instead of coming much faster as they have been for the past few months. This also means the growth has slowed to where the difficultly algorithm can keep up.
What does this mean to you? Well it probably means that you can actually plan out your block rewards now. You can use 32EiB as a pretty reliable stand-in for network size and get some relatively reliable information back this is a big deal for those of us planning over the long term.
The reason for this is almost certainly the price. If the price starts to go up in any meaningful sense, or starts getting traded in more volume at bigger exchanges then I think we will see a large growth cycle begin again.
