It appears as though the chain has split, possibly an attempt to fork the chain awhile back. From what I've gathered there are currently two chains, the original legit chain from which I created the bootstrap.dat file from back in April now has 54288 blocks. The other (bad) chain has well over 584426 blocks.
A look at getpeerinfo reveals clients that have mixed subversions, all of which also have the starting height around 584426 blocks.
/DGC:2.0.0/
/WorldcoinFoundation:0.8.6.2/
/42:0.7.0/
/MemeCoin:2.2.0/
There are currently only a handfull clients, one of which is the block explorer that has the correct starting height and is also on the (correct) client version.
To stop your client from connecting to these rogue peers and seeing your wallet get out of sync, you need to edit your royalcoin.conf file and connect directly to the good peers. Using connect instead of addnode will prevent the other peers from connecting.
connect=50.128.154.237
connect=63.170.87.173
connect=70.164.233.141
connect=70.164.233.143
connect=173.238.180.157
connect=204.11.237.73
connect=108.172.121.86
These have the correct starting height at around 54294.
This is only a temporary fix until the client is updated.
it looks like Royalcoin, Worldcoin and Memecoin all use the same "peerMagic"
unsigned char pchMessageStart[4] = { 0xfb, 0xc0, 0xb6, 0xdb }; // Royalcoin: increase each by adding 2 to bitcoin's value.
unsigned char pchMessageStart[4] = { 0xfb, 0xc0, 0xb6, 0xdb }; // MemeCoin: increase each by adding 2 to bitcoin's value.
unsigned char pchMessageStart[4] = { 0xfb, 0xc0, 0xb6, 0xdb }; // Worldcoin: increase each by adding 2 to worldcoin's value.
the peerMagic can't be changed without destroying the block chain.
The easiest fix would be to set the client/subversion name to RYC or Royal and only answer/accept other clients that have the same subversion name.
then each time a checkpoint is needed the client could be set to answer/accept other clients that have the same subversion name and build number.
The 'magic bits' can be changed without destroying the block chain. The Peercoin chain originally used the same values as Bitcoin, but a patch has since changed those values. Here is the relevant patch on GitHub:
https://github.com/ppcoin/ppcoin/commit/6b0e5bf1425e8d96732cc7133aee048c2a35d17cChanging the messageStart values and improving the difficulty adjustment should be done at a minimum in order to improve the health of the chain.
