I don't think it's about XPM replacing YAC, but I think there's mainly 2 things that are putting in danger YAC and preventing its raise:
- The sudden, N increases. I don't know if it's possible to 'smoothen' the effects without a hard-fork, but it would be worth considering. The average foe is probably not OK with their hashrate halving overnight and difficulty taking 5-6 days to adjust. Since the N concept probably has to stay this way as it's 'the concept' of the coin, I guess the change should come with difficulty reacting faster after a N change.
Yes, that's impossible without a hard fork.
EDIT:
However, as YAC has PoS mining, the PoW difficulty/Nfactor changes are not important. PoW should only be used for the initial distribution of coins. PoS will eventually overtake PoW and then invalidate it altogether as PoS blocks have much larger "trust" value assigned to them compared to PoW blocks which have a trust of 1 (just look at NVC).
Also, it's quite easy to supress PoW entirely if any large YAC holder wanted to do so - just hold onto your coins and when you see a PoW block on the network, ignore it and quickly make one PoS block linking to the previous block (not the new PoW block). The other peers will happily orphan the PoW block. You will need to make some code changes to your client first, but it's not that difficult and IMHO worth it for the lulz. Just imagine all the YAC pools getting nothing but orphans.
Now I hope you see the futility of PoW mining a coin that has PoS.
So hashrate/N changes/whatever is not an issue for YAC in the long run (when there are many coins participating in proof of stake).
END EDIT.
- The lack of development news (not blaming the dev(s), I understand you can't do miracles with few numbers, but it's an issue from outside).
Currently we're trying to improve the client start-up time. Not much success so far (moved to LevelDB), but I've got an idea. (Make a bounty!
)
If these 2 things are tackled I don't see why YAC couldn't become more widespread. If nothing changes, well, I'm afraid we'll all have a good amount of very cheap coins.
They're already quite cheap.
Time to buy!