Thanks Ahmed_bodi and Digigami,

That makes a bit more sense. I guess the overall network is a bit fragmented with very few nodes available, hence the gaps. How is this affecting the difficulty though. My miner (bfgminer) says that the network has over 200 GH/s rate, but when I look at CoinChoose, the hash rate is listed as only ~9 GH/s. How often are blocks supposed to be generated? Bitcoin is supposed to be about every 10 minutes, correct? If Bytecoin is supposed to be 1:1 to bitcoin, then the difficulty seems too high because blocks are not being solved for hours (last I checked).

I understand that merged mining should help, because that would allow more people to mine while mining Bitcoin. But are there any stats on how many people merge mine or what the merge mine hash rate is? The only pool I know (besides P2Pool merge mining) that does merged mining is Bitparking, and their hash rate is only 9k GH/s.

Thanks again.