We're not quite dead yet. In fact, I think we're getting better! (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grbSQ6O6kbs)
I came to this coin as a challenge. I'd originally heard of it from americanpegasus (infamous Redditor in crypto circles) being mocked for having supported it. And when I did my coin-a-day article on it (/r/cryptocurrency series for which this handle was originally created; since removed but slowly being republished as "coin-a-week" once every month or so), I was expecting it to be a dead coin. Everyone was making comments like seen above in the subreddit and I thought they must know what they were talking about.
But when I went to go actually look into it, I found that there was the absolute bare minimum enough to survive: there was an exchange, Cryptsy (which certainly has its issues, but keeps running), and there was a pool, prohashing (which I have extraordinary respect for after working with them; very technically savvy and helpful; truly a wonderful member of the cryptocurrency community) [actually also xpool but they seemed to have very low and inconsistent hashing power], and there was a block explorer, nyancha.in, now-defunct.
Since then, there has been incredible growth, not merely in terms of price appreciation, but also, and more importantly, in terms of community and technical development.
It's true that we don't really have a core dev at this point, but we also don't really seem to need one at this moment. A more pressing concern was when the block explorer went down. This was a major crisis for us, yet the community stepped up and put up block explorers quite quickly (
https://nyan.space/chain/Nyancoin and
http://bitfarm.mooo.com/nyan/block_crawler.php). We also got another major hub site for Nyancoins (
http://www.nyancoin.info/), which includes a helpful status page (we'd been getting some serious hit-and-run issues which this helped monitor; within the last few hours it's possible we've picked up a dedicated miner and I also learned to use transaction fees to get us unstuck after a difficulty spike).
It's true that in the long-run we'll need to be able to do core updates. I've started looking into this and it looks like it should be pretty simple to rebase onto the latest Litecoin. I'm not aware of any pressing need for a client update, but I think it's important precisely because otherwise people will question whether or not we can do it. I'm targeting the end of August as the deadline for having updated clients released, but I'm hoping it can be done in half that or a bit less.
After I do the core client update, I'll work on getting an Android wallet released based on the litecoin one. I don't know when that will be ready, but, like all of this project, it's going to be an awesome learning experience for me. I've never even owned a smartphone; a Nyancoins wallet is the killer app for me!
The community has gone from being as dead as this thread to being quite active and involved. One of the cool projects right now in the works by /u/KojoSlayer is to create a Nyancoins Minecraft server which will be like a badass faucet in that you get paid Nyancoins for playing there. I've been wanting to get a faucet for the community (and that's another task on my plate as well), and I wanted us to have something fun rather than the crappy ad-filled stuff like everyone else. This is looking incredible.
If anyone would like some free Nyancoins, I encourage them to checkout
http://reddit.com/r/getfairshare, a universal basic income project based on cryptocurrency which I have stocked with Nyancoins as an early faucet. The total distribution tends to be around 300-500 bits in value per day.
I apologize for not being more active over here. There's just a lot of things to do with Nyancoins, and I've got a lot of things going on in my life too. But I'll try to stay more on top of this. The main hub is definitely the subreddit though, and there are a lot of users there who can help assist you if I'm not around right then.
This is absolutely still a reviving coin. We have our challenges and we're working on them. I've even got a thread dedicated to collecting the major risk factors:
http://www.reddit.com/r/nyancoins/comments/36e7ed/overview_of_major_risks_of_buying_nyancoins/. I hadn't actually put the lack of a core dev on there; I still don't think that's a major issue at this point compared to the rest, but I'll add it in now. One of the major ones right now are about 6 million Nyancoins sitting as a ceiling at 40 satoshi; that ~2.5 BTC ask is far more than our typical daily volume. But we'll get through that like we've gotten through everything else.
For a dead coin, we're sure pretty alive and kicking.
And updated holdings disclosure: I now hold about 60 million Nyancoins, which is about 25% of the currently available supply. I believe strongly in this coin and I've put my money, time, and reputation where my mouth is.
TO INFINITY AND BEYOND!