Before I put my 2 cents in I need to ask if there is a way that we can get the current chain moving by creating nodes that agree to start talking to one another starting 2 blocks  back on the current chain. essentially Im asking if the network can be "rebooted" by forking the current chain.   It is unfortunate that I have very little programming background and this situation might poke me to start changing that.

 I am looking at this as a great opportunity. Even if we cant recover the current situation, we can take what we learn here and build something new that perhaps includes what we would have liked the coin to be to begin with. I would support a new coin or other situation that helped us get by this but i think it's important to learn what happened here so that anything we do after this includes the ability to keep something like this from happening again or to fix it if it dose happen again.  I plan to do what I can to support things but my limited programming ability is going to leave me out of the development side of things for now.

 I suspect that this might have been an attack because after looking at the chain explorer there is multiple "next block" hashs where I notice that many times there  is only one next hash line associated with a block.

 What ever happened, deliberate or not, I think if we could start processing one block back from the current stuck block and move forward things would likely start moving again. problem is, if it was an attack it can keep happening if we do not understand it.    

 Is there a way to see what node/client processed a transaction? I would love to be able to see more detail on what happened with that hash rate spike.