The block explorer is now reporting data for the Prototype coin testnet chain:

https://minkiz.co/abe/chain/PrototypeCoinChain

I'm having at go at replicating the problem on testnet.

From their posts, it would appear that the OPs fumbled the reconfiguration of the WinCoin clone by failing to filter out the premine inherited along with the cloned WinCoin code, as observed earlier by sdmathis and which has been accused of causing the sync problems through imposing a disproportionate staking weight.

I've left the code as is. The premine is safely in my testnet wallet and I plan to use reservebalance to drastically lighten the stake weight, see if that's a fix. The size of the reserve directly affects the stake weight, 750 PTY is currently yielding a stake weight of 8 vs a network weight of 0. When all the coins are placed in reserve, the stake weight drops to 0, as you'd expect.

Testnet's on block 357 at the moment, should pass 697 sometime during the night (only needs a couple of threads to maintain the rate of production). If it doesn't seize up, then that would suggest whoever owns the wallet with the premine could unstick the mainnet by reserving the premine coins.

With respect to the quality of the codebase: WinCoin itself is a clone of Carsen Keck's DreamCoin, the latter a shameless hijacking of now-forgotten hackcoin (a competent “best-of-breed” fusion) evidenced by the macx target binding in the  Dreamcoin Qt qmake file:


and as faithfully reproduced by the WinCoin devs, the Prototypecoin devs and dozens of others

That's a fair amount of field testing and it doesn't seem to have acquired a bad rep.

Cheers

Graham