Is there an estimated time for this coin to be great again, or has it reached the end of the road...
Hello all,
There is a new pull request, hot off the presses, from 22 hours ago(!)
https://github.com/senadj/yacoin/pull/9and there is a working Windows leveldb "boot set" at
http://lostabout.com/btc/yac/yac048boot.zipi.e. a blockchain of ~12/15/2016, MS & gcc daemons for Windows, and a Qt for Windows, suggested .conf, batch files, etc. These can be used with (a copy of) your wallet.dat
These exes are all good to go on MainNet with no future date concerns.
They all have the get YAC price function, and the Qt version has the built in block explorer

This is for any brave Windows' souls who wish to try it out. Hint, read the readme in the .zip file

Since I don't 'do' linux, I can't build exes for non Windows OSs.
Ron
A slightly improved version, 0.4.8.3, at
https://lostabout.com/btc/yac/yac0483boot.zip, which is just the PR above, plus
https://github.com/ya4-old-c-coder/yacoin/commit/5f908fa1f0e37136b3f970e09f2e3dc9ae53f4bb 'getyacprice' should now work on non Windows systems! Also a better price source is chosen. Also the Nfactor code calculators were fixed since they can't go past Nf 25.
The Github links are provided so that those proficient in linux & the Mac can build their versions of this software.
We need linux & Mac builders to flesh out the software for all OSs. I can only do Windows.
Even though YAC is basically a clone of NVC, and that NVC is a clone of BTC pre 0.8.1 where the first leveldb Tx database was introduced, in 3/17/2013, it still has some features that bitcoin and other coins don't have. Namely a built in block explorer, in the Qt version, and a new command
getyacprice. No other coin, to the best of my knowledge has these.
Also, since it is "older" code, which doesn't make it any less good, it can be built with older or newer tools, libraries, etc. Which to me is an advantage.
What all bitcoin sources and clones thereof need is a "going over" by professional programmers. See
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=225163.0;all and I'm sorry to say, things haven't changed in 8 years.
You can get a sense of my concerns by reading the comments to my PR #9
https://github.com/senadj/yacoin/pull/9 mentioned above.
We am working on two competing new versions of YAC, that both need TestNet testing, and may become reality in either order. One attempts to address the "greedy miner" issue by live adjustments to PoW & PoS block's "value" and ratios of PoW to PoS blocks. The other is a PoW scrypt-jane only model with a low constant inflation of 2% (MAX, given destruction of fees) in the YAC total, with a lower Nfactor than the current Nf 18.
Ron
The 5 .DLLs are only needed by the Qt program, not by the daemons, if anyone is interested. And the blockchain is up to 2/4/2017 so is pretty current. If you have used the other (12/15/2016) blockchain and are "up to date", you should only take the new EXEs.
These releases and their source code allow us to test new PoW-PoS trust-ratios-... changes on TestNet at any time. This is to thwart the "greedy miner" problem of the past. This may be alleviated by the higher Nfactor now in play? I don't know, does anyone with H/W have any feeling/knowledge on this?