Sorry for essentially taking over this thread -- we should probably create a new one for general info/etc at some point now that this thing has derailed a bit. I had one last thought for the night on this topic:

I solo mined for 51 hours after the reward reduction at an average of 33,600 KH/s. In this span, I found 63 blocks...which is nearly 1/3 of all 125 coin blocks up until right now (even after I shut down all of my Megacoin miners almost a day ago.) I mined less than 8000 Megacoins in 51 hours @ 33.6 MH/s...which at current market value are worth roughly 1/2 BTC (or ~$55 USD.) It took 663 kilowatts of power to mine those 63 blocks; at my current power rate, that is a cost of $86.19 -- I ended up with a loss of over $30 during that span, I was frustrated that the difficulty still hadn't corrected itself, and I got the bonus of this ALIEN guy losing his shit when I posted about it -- not that great of a combo.

During the same span, I was mining Litecoins with the other half of my farm (split between 3 pools each with a 2% combined fee/donation) at an average of 34,000 KH/s. During those same 51 hours, I brought in 92.45 LTC. Based on current market value, that's about 2.7 BTC (or ~$300 USD.) It took 667 kilowatts of power on that half; at my current rate, this comes to $86.71 in power costs over that span. On the Litecoin side, I brought in over a $200 profit.

I lost out on roughly $250 USD by continuing to mine Megacoin for the 2 days following the reward reduction. Had I mined something even more profitable than Litecoin with my Megacoin miners (or used multipool/etc) the margin would grow even more. To make matters worse, the status of the network is still uncertain.

My point is this: If adjustments are not made to the calculation formula, the hash rate will just continue to fall, prolonging this situation even further even if the difficulty keeps trickling downward. Obviously I don't fully understand the calculations yet, and maybe this next retarget will get us where we need to be, but I somehow doubt it. We know that there is another reward reduction coming up 30 days after things are finally rolling again...and we can be almost certain this same situation will arise when that happens. Actually, it will likely be worse, as at the very least I'm going to have to step away next time...and at this point I've personally mined almost 1/3 of the blocks after the reduction. I cannot justify that much lost profit every 30 days...and we aren't even out of this rut yet so who knows how long it will last? Not to mention every time this happens people lose their confidence in the currency...meaning it will be harder and harder to build back value on the exchange (meaning less people mining/etc -- especially since the rewards are actually smaller.) As much as it's being downplayed, this is a serious issue.

I think the bottom line is that adjustments have to be made to guarantee this coin has a life beyond 2013...and they might as well be made right away. As it stands now, every reward reduction is going to be viewed as a giant cliff. I know I'm not going to be comfortable holding a large amount of Megacoins going into the next reward reduction if no changes are made to the calculations. It would be great if there was a way to offer incentives for people that keep mining and moving the network moving forward -- there are some dedicated guys mining away right now and getting totally screwed in the process...but they outlasted me and are pushing forward anyway. We can't count on this happening every single time (really, even this situation isn't acceptable.)