Our problem has to do with the low volume fundamentally. The low volume happened because our market cap is so ridiculously low. Because of our low volume we can't get anybody to take the coin whether it is marketplaces or Cryptsy.
Our problem is not low volume, it is low price. The price is very low and continues to fall, the low price results in very few miners, very few investors, very little interest in the coin.
Second, our community will grow as long as there are people who hold the coin. Our current status is not encouraging community since we have so few miners (due to low network hash) and any miners who are not already long term holders are basically dumping the coin as soon as they mine it.
I don't think people holding the coin will cause the community to grow. If anything lots of tipping on reddit, moving the coin around will allow the coin to grow. A sudden spike in the price would also help (by driving miners to the coin, boosting it's position on coinmarketcap.com etc.)
I realize now we have a fundamental problem (had I realized this problem months ago I would have sold all my NYAN then, but since I didn't, here I am trying to work around it). That problem is, sure we have 7 million people following nyancat but 99.999999% don't know anything about crypto nor could they care less.
I agree with this. Sure there are lots of people on the Nyancat facebook page but they have not been given a reason to care about nyancoin. Some ideas that would change this:
1) Nyancoin incorporation into an ALREADY popular Nyan game. Let people buy in-game items with 1-2 Nyan, let them earn nyan with a browser miner.
2) Nyancoin incorporation into the Nyancat store
3) Special items in the Nyancat store that can only be purchased with Nyancoin
4) Special items in an already popular Nyancat game that can be purchased only with Nyancoin
On the other hand, the people that actually build a coin, the crypto community, leave as soon as they see that the coin is not a good investment. The current version of the coin is not a good investment because:
We are under 20% of the way to the max coin count.
Our distribution is slow so our network hash is destined to be small.
Inflation and low volume make the coin unattractive to be accepted in any market.
We are attempting to cater to a community that frankly has proven they do not know or care about crypto.
The root of our problems is low demand for the coin, and thus low price. A lot of these issues wouldn't really be problems if we just had some more demand for the coin.
X-11 changes nothing fundamentally about the coin, it just makes the GPUs cooler. This won't make a flood of people suddenly care about the coin.
Changing to X11 was not meant to be a game changer, brining in lots of new people - we just need to move away from scrypt because if we don't in one months time the Asics will start raping us - they will find every single block and immediately dump the coin, amplifying our current problem of low demand/low price.
Changing to POS is a different story, if we did that, then inflation would not be a problem. The coin would be rarer which would make people want to buy it more. We could start to build the volume we need for marketplaces. Once marketplaces take us, then we can make advertisements to the nyancat community and they will start to care since they can then buy things with the coin.
Changing to POS alone would not affect inflation. Only a change in reward schedule would affect inflation. (ie 337 coins every 1 minute would still continue to be true with POS). As far as building volume, that will ONLY come with more demand/ higher prices.
What is the best case scenario for X-11? We get a small boost of attention, maybe a few hardcore miners will stick around, but the price of the coin will not change since we would be helping the miners, not the investors. POS would be encouraging investors to buy the coin, which is what we need to save it.
Your main point is that POS will make the coin more rare which will increase investor demand, but this isn't true, 337 coins will continue to be produced every minute - just via POS not via mining. We can of course change this to something lower, which might help the price problem that we have by reducing supply. Maybe 33.7 coins every minute would be a good solution. X11 is not being proposed to boost investor interest, it is being proposed to make mining viable once ASICs hit the market. I think you want the algo change to fix the fundamental problem that the coin has: no demand. I don't see POS or X11 increasing demand very much. But at least switching away from scrypt will allow the coin to still be mined by a normal GPU, keeping it accessible to everyday users.