Well then you need to figure something out. You said that you would never give up on getting this fixed. I know you could sort it out if you wanted. Tag up with crestington. ahmed and a few more. Give them some of the coins left over from the swap and get this shit on the road! Cmon!
just make it work and make it stable! Even if you dont get it as you really want it just make it work! And we go from there! Gogogo!
If I felt confident I could do it on my own I would just do it, post the sourcecode and let you guys work out the final values. I haven't created a hardfork before so I don't want to do it and see you guys suffer and hurt my own reputation. Ahmed said he's about halfway done a patch of HoboNickels so what I can do to help would be some bug testing, hosting nodes and seednodes. A seednode cost about $90 USD a year and regular nodes start from $5 a month depending on the size of the VPS, I would host as many as you guys want as long as I can be paid upfront each month the cost of maintaining the nodes, $30-$40 a month isn't too much but it's still an extra expense I wouldn't want to incur each month.
When it comes to the Blockchain, the main factor that needs to be taken into account is it's growth rate over time. Every transaction whether it is POW, POS or sending transactions adds to the size of the Blockchain. If you have a 30 second Block time it is great for speed of transactions but over a long period it can cause a significant amount of bloat to the point where it is both time and resource heavy to sync and maintain full nodes. Transactions themselves also play a major role in the size of the Blockchain over time, if a person has a large amount of small inputs they are combining into a transaction it adds a significant amount of extra data into the Blockchain, far more than just what is accrued through Blocktime. If you have a balance of 100,000 consisting of 1000 small inputs or more, it can add several MB of extra bloat into the Blockchain in one transaction.
Fees play a large role in limiting the Blockchain size and IMO are more important than the amount of inflation per year because it both limits size and pays holders through POS. Fractalcoin experimented with 0.5% fees on transactions which should not be confused with most Blockchains that have a fee of 5 * CENT which would equal 0.05 coins per transaction. The problem with every transaction having a minimum fee or percentage of the transaction being sent is that the entire amount will go directly into the next block so for example if the transaction were 100k with 0.5% of that transaction being collected as a fee (500 coins), if the network difficulty is low and someone staked 1000 coins they would receive the amount of inflation for their coinage, plus the 500 coins collected as a fee and any other fees collected in the previous Block. A more practical approach in regards to percentage fees would be to have every fee collected, split up and paid out over the minimum staking period and the maximum staking period equal to twice the minimum (5/10, 7/14, 10/20, 15/30). In this way it would create a base minimum that would always be received through Stake depending on volume and would create competition in order to Stake as frequently as possible throughout the period but also having enough coinage in each transaction so you are staking sooner rather than later. This method hasn't been implemented on any coin (because you have to go by the previous Block only) but it should because arbitraging exchanges for trading profits would generate a significant amount of revenue for long-term holders on top of the inflation per year.
Virtually every Cryptocurrency try to set out to be a currency and it's this approach that has seen constant declines over time. It should be treated as a company where a portion of Stake is retained in order to pay for services. Let's face it, donations do not work because if price drops lower than the point at which a person purchased their coins, no one wants to donate funds in order to help pay for essential services when already at a loss. I proposed this to Zack some months ago but he was very against the idea and we didn't talk much after that. I still think Proof of Stake only, percentage fees and a percentage of Stake to a Development Fund is the way to go for any coin. If you were to decide to go that route, the best way would be to start with what would be the minimum fixed fee, then work on developing percentage fees distributed over time for anything higher than the fixed fee and then once that complete to work on a shared Development Fund. A percentage of Stake going to a Development Fund would equal the same amount of transactions as Blocks per year so something like that would need to be implemented in a share system similar to Devcoin so you aren't going to have a 500 MB wallet (525k transactions at roughly 1 kb per transaction) after one year and would also need to make use of multi-signature transactions so that it is not reliant on one trusted person but a group of trusted people in order to be used.
Most of this is mainly theory but is definitely possible, it's all about how new ideas are implemented and what effects they will have from trade to user experience over time.
My 2 Satoshis