I doubt you're telling the truth about your "massive project", OP. Bitcoin was at $7700 only for a short time (less than an hour). $7300-7500 was the highest point it reached for a considerable time. So either you failed miserably negotiating a fair price or you are only trying to increase your post count.

To answer anyway: Yes, I believe it will cross $7000 again. I don't know if its' this year, but I'm sure it will do so until 2019. $5500 could also be only a dip, due to heavy BTC/BCH speculation.

(And this thread belongs into the "Speculation" forum.)

I think you misunderstood a point, if the 5 months pass and btce does not come back online buyer does not get anything. Its basically like a double down on a roulette game, if you win and btce is back your money doubles, if you don't you lose it all and seller gets the jackpot.

As smooth mentioned you can access stats on the website. In case of aeon.sumominer.com go to "Home" Tab and look at the "Your Stats & Payment History" part. Enter your view key of the wallet and press "Lookup". Now you see your hashrate and how much you mined already.

If you dont know your view key public wallet address anymore, either check out the file [walletname].address.txt in your aeond folder or enter "address" in your simplewallet.
https://wiki.bytecoin.org/wiki/Simplewallet_command_line_arguments_and_commands

About my pool, no its not local, its just a pool like any other:)
For choosing a pool its mostly about 3 things for me:
- Treshold of payment (Tab: Payments) which indicates how much you need to mine before the pool pays you out
- Total pool fee + core Dev donation (Tab: Home) how much the pool deducts from your mining for maintenance cost and supporting the devs. The total pool fee includes the core dev donation/pool core dev donation.
- hashrate, make sure the pool doesnt have over 50% of the total hashrate of aeon, else its bad for the decentralization, i.e. bad for aeon in general

hope this helps a lil with understanding

[2017-05-19 10:59:50] thread 0: 615 hashes, 10.52 H/s
[2017-05-19 10:59:51] thread 3: 620 hashes, 10.49 H/s
[2017-05-19 10:59:52] thread 2: 628 hashes, 10.42 H/s
[2017-05-19 11:00:21] thread 1: 640 hashes, 10.45 H/s

If you need a pool for mining, I can recommend these guys:

https://aeon.kryptopool.com/#getting_started

They have helpful information for getting your miner pointed at their pool correctly and I can vouch for being paid every time I mine there.

[2017-05-18 20:45:56] Using JSON-RPC 2.0
[2017-05-18 20:45:56] Starting Stratum on stratum+tcp://aeon.sumominer.com:3333
[2017-05-18 20:45:56] 4 miner threads started, using 'cryptonight' algorithm.
[2017-05-18 20:45:56] Binding thread 0 to cpu 0
[2017-05-18 20:45:56] Binding thread 1 to cpu 1
[2017-05-18 20:45:56] Binding thread 2 to cpu 2
[2017-05-18 20:45:56] Binding thread 3 to cpu 3
[2017-05-18 20:45:57] Pool set diff to 5000
[2017-05-18 20:45:57] Stratum detected new block
[2017-05-18 20:45:57] thread 0: 1 hashes, 5.14 H/s
[2017-05-18 20:45:57] thread 3: 2 hashes, 8.52 H/s
[2017-05-18 20:45:57] thread 2: 2 hashes, 7.79 H/s
[2017-05-18 20:45:57] thread 1: 2 hashes, 6.18 H/s
[2017-05-18 20:46:32] thread 0: 310 hashes, 8.83 H/s
[2017-05-18 20:46:39] thread 1: 372 hashes, 8.73 H/s
[2017-05-18 20:46:42] thread 3: 397 hashes, 8.69 H/s
[code]

Recently thehihoguy announced a new pool:
http://185.166.239.22/#

(Reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/Aeon/comments/6bfvz4/new_aeon_pool_in_amsterdam_available/)

Let's spread the hashrate!