ghash only makes up a very small percentage of the overall network (10% of last check) so them taking their cloud miners offline will likely have a very small impact on the overall network hashrate.

The trend seems to be that a lot of people are having to take their equipment offline because of the lowered price. The current estimate is that the difficulty is going to decline by around 2.5% however it appears that it will probably end up going down by more then that based on the 506 average block time

It should..n I think it will! Hopefully sooner than later!

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is an example of why you don't calculate hashrate difficulty on a block-by-block basis (or however Alloscomp does it). It's terribly inaccurate.

It's important to note that bitcoinwisdom isn't really very accurate in terms of it's projected difficulty change right after it's changed. It could easily swing to a positive number over the next 10 days.

As has been noted before, The "turn off" of inefficient mining hardware can be delayed by a number of things. It might well be less costly to the organization to mine at a small loss than incur a bigger loss by turning off a miner altogether.

Difficulty won't be dropping this period imho.  Too much newer/more efficient hardware coming online.

Well, an industrial miner using widely available gear (0.5W per GH/s) and only paying $0.05 per kWh means they'll be profitable (at this difficulty) until the Bitcoin price drops to ~$53 ...or until difficulty increases to 167,638,063,430 (@ $200 per Bitcoin).

So, unfortunately for us home miners, there's room for movement.

 we are down at the moment 0.2% to 2.95%  

see chart here

http://btc.blockr.io/charts

feb 10    142
feb 11    159
feb 12    124
feb 13    144      


 normal is 144    so 4 x 144 = 576

 the 4 days above are         = 559   we are 17 blocks short of normal  about - 2.95%


the s-3 is a white elephant in the room  more then 50ph of them around the world getting .8 watts per gh. 

reliable gear this gear is being turned on and off as we seesaw up and down each adjustment.

 if your power is 12 cents and price is 208 your s-3 breaks even
if your power is  13 cents  and price is 225 your s-3  breaks even

people are jumping back and forth with s-3's

It's usually because the price of BTC tanked.

bitcoin mining difficulty will continue to rise
check this site , here you can find current bitcoin difficulty, estimated next difficulty and the history of bitcoin mining difficulty also the historical charts
https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty

Totally agree with this point. Are we going to see home miners vanish and a back and forth battle between big farms that switch hardware on and off dependent on their hashing power, location, costs etc?