Firstly, thanks to HankRules for his donation - the Bounties are reopened. (I will be updating OP again soon).

Now, looking at the blocks found, it does seem that a lot (well, relatively) of hashrate appeared on the network suddenly. This could potentially be EC2 cloud instances or such (this happens in most CPU coins, including Monero etc). If someone has made a GPU miner, hopefully they will submit it and obtain the bounty now that the bounties are back.

As for claims of gpu mining myself - if I had the capability to GPU Mine, I would be able to release the gpu mining software itself and thus make this presumably more popular - which would be far more valuable than just mining them on my own.

Currently, I have the premine bounty which is for bounty and services - as my i3 laptop processor isn't exactly high-end, I don't know how many blocks I would find with it.

I am not sure if it is a compilation issue or not, but I know that the source code when compiled on Linux does allow multi-core mining. So maybe the windows version was compiled with a single thread implementation? I didn't make this version, so I cannot confirm this.

If 'ascii' could reply in this thread and let us know if this is the case, we would appreciate it.