Re: The difficulty HAS BEEN REDUCED!!!!

It might be a tiny reduction, but I think that the start of a new era is now becoming more obvius. We kept seing mining becoming more centralised, mining at home kept becoming harder while the difficulty was constanly rising and the price was around 350. I believe that this reduction was caused by home miner being pulled off the wall because of not being profitable anymore.

It's possible that there was a genuine reduction in capacity, but with this small a difficulty change it's also pretty likely that it's just a result of statistical variances and we have no real way of knowing whether the network is expanding or contracting. In a network where there's no actual change in capacity, variances of +/-5% are pretty likely: http://hashingit.com/analysis/28-reach-for-the-ear-defenders

Indeed it is, but mining used to be an arms race. The total network hashrate was constantly increasing for more than a year until this point.

It's still an arms race, but the slowdown in hash rate expansion was predictable (I did predict it :-)) once everyone was running close to state-of-the-art hardware with low supplier margins and energy costs had been reduced as far as possible. Things can still move with a technology shift (such as when 16nm ASICs or more power efficient 28nm/20nm devices come online) or if the BTC price increases though. The hash rate will ultimately absorb every optimisation possible!