This has not been tested for some time.  Have you certainly installed the aptcoin_scrypt and stratum_mining from the aptcoin github sources after or instead of installing the normal ones?  Also, the configuration appears to not be correct.  Perhaps yours is trying to use sha256 instead of scrypt-nm?

The difficulty is relatively low for any modern CPU, so it's worth trying.  If no luck, the market is of course an option.

Thanks!

Strangely enough, this is by design and it's working as intended.  Smoother changes in n-factor can't really be coordinated without opening up new attack surfaces.

The issue is that it takes a long time to hash high n-factors and a short amount of time to hash low n-factors.  The only real parameter that can be tweaked there is the difficulty, which helps to balance things -- but it can't be too drastic either.  In most coins, the amount the difficulty can change (in either direction) is tapered so that the swings are not so large.  Apt-curve specifically addresses that for  this coin and allows significantly larger swings as calculated to keep the average amount of time for the last N number of blocks to match the target time.  But that's an average time across N blocks, not the time on average for any particular n-factor.  It still means higher ones take longer and shorter ones are quick.

If you think of it as transaction processing, it's true that the network can appear stuck for some time while working on a high n-factor, but as transactions pile up, they are all cleared shortly after unless the network is really unlucky and gets a string of high n-factors in a row.

The n-factors are truly random and are computed based on the winning hash of the previous round.  It's crucial that it can't be predicted what n-factors are upcoming otherwise miners can easily attack the network by jumping in on the scheduled low n-factors and jumping out for the high ones, leaving the chain completely unviable at a high difficulty.

It's open source.  You're welcome to add code or propose improvements.

That's how it's designed.  Block 105120 was the estimated first year cut-off at the time of launch.  That period was a bit of a burn-in and now it's on the normal schedule.  50 APT is the block reward for all remaining time with the exception of reward halvings.

What is the problem requiring difficulty re-targeting?  We're already using Apt-Curve, which was designed specifically for this coin.  I'm not aware of further shortcomings.

I have never heard of yobit.  Can anyone else vouch for them being legitimate and not a scam?  How long have they been around?

If everyone thinks it's a good idea, I'm supportive of you or someone else starting a donation pot.  I will donate some too, although I'm skeptical of this exchange because I've never heard of them.  Maybe I'm behind and they're great.  Let me know what others think?

Updated!  I checked all the original nodes and one was still active.  If you know of others, please pass them along.

Thanks!

Thanks for bringing that to my attention, I did not realize it was a broken link.  I've updated it in the first post, and it's here as well:

https://mega.nz/#!61B2jKzS!7Tho4XLnTPawRtkdbk6SF9rvn5sNkrN1LQ6NcDEezAM

It seems you've made up your mind about what happened, but I can tell you how it went on our side. We put months of research and work into the development and wrote a white paper presenting the technology.  We were never interested in "make my job, invest, and i withdraw profits", as a matter of fact, we couldn't care less if it ever hit an exchange.  The community asked for that.  Altcoin pump and dumps are pennies compared to what we actually make, so even though it's a common perception of altcoin developers, anyone able to develop an innovative technology on top of an existing cryptocurrency infrastructure likely thinks differently. Unless you're ethereum, it's probably always a net loss given the opportunity cost.  If genuine curiosity and good will was not involved, a clone coin would always be the way to go.

It's true that we more or less threw the technology over the wall to see what people would do with it, but it's not true that we didn't make updates and stick around for many months sinking even more time in, working on pool support (that no one setup, although people requested the work), prototyping GPU support (and finding it not possible on all N-factors, at least with the hardware that we had on hand), re-writing the difficulty re-target after studying how it was working in practice, etc.  I realize you couldn't have been around in the first few months because we updated the first post frequently back then.  I personally wanted to see how the community would react to it because at the time, simple clone coins were way more popular and pump and dumps were rampant.  I didn't want to be a part of that, so Aptcoin was the result.  What I saw is that communities appeared way more interested in pump and dumps and profit opportunities than anything else.  That's what it looked like to me anyway and it was very unmotivating.  As a matter of fact, it made me sick and I nearly stopped following altcoins all together. Our team long since fell apart too, which was another reason to step away from the project.

So does this mean, I don't believe in the technology or this coin?  Of course not, but cryptocurrency is only as useful as a community makes it.  And that's what we lacked.  I didn't ask the community for anything, but on the flip side, I wasn't going to keep investing time into this project if nothing was happening either.  That's just common sense.  It's open source and anyone can use it or build on it too.

Long story short, I'm kind of surprised people are still here, and that's what makes me want to continue working on this.

I like the website and the explorer is great.  A faucet would also be a welcome addition.  I'm still not interested in an exchange personally for various reasons.  There are many ways to use cryptos without simply trading them in a zero sum game.  Liquidity is arguably nice, but it's not a priority or interest of mine.

If I could make one suggestion, I'd like to see a link to the whitepaper from the website, but since this is volunteer based, don't feel obligated to do that.

No, we are looking for the community to help chip-in if there's interest in this coin.  We provided significant development at the start and since it didn't catch on, we moved on.  I'm willing to help out as needed if people are into this coin though.

It's been a while 

Thanks for sticking around and keeping this coin going.  I saw some messages from a few of you recently and wanted to point out a few things:

• Aptcoin is based on real technology developed by us and not simply cloned from other coins.
• Aptcoin has not been on a real exchange* and has never been pumped or dumped, that was never the intent.
• Aptcoin did not have the early following we anticipated, and the community was not there to help sustain the development further.

*NOTE: Aptcoin is on Askcoin.net (<--- SCAM site).  Please DO NOT try to deposit any coins there because they will be lost forever.  I've heard that the support will not answer any requests or return any amounts.  Someone verified that sending a small amount of APT to their account wallet just swallows the coins and they never appear in the balance.  Don't be fooled.  You've been warned.

That said, if all of you are willing to help out, I think we can make this work!

I've already put back up some full nodes to keep the network well meshed.  The block explorer mentioned on this page earlier is very nice, thanks for doing that.  If anyone has web or wordpress skills and can volunteer a site, we could certainly use it.

Does anyone have ideas on what will help spark this coin further?

Some of the devs are still here and we're watching and securing the network.  The community hasn't yet formed, or have seemingly moved on to other coins, so it's hard to gauge the interest levels.  We're still behind the Scrypt-NM proof of work algorithm and think others will realize the potential at some point in the future.

Interestingly not reproduce-able.

Instead of a screenshot that could easily be forged, why not use the direct link to allow others to see for themselves?

https://www.virustotal.com/en/url/9e67e2292bddfd60e04b0a6e1c57a93a4dfc674f2074a3fd9194b10ac40035aa/analysis/

So this is starting somewhere, But the message is not clear to the casual user. Maybe explain what the n blocks are and why some blocks do not go through the hole on the asics

Very cool! Thanks for keeping this community moving forward!

Attention all Pool Operators:

We have added stratum support for aptcoin to the stratum-mining module.  All of the code is in github, and the easiest way to get it is as follows:

https://github.com/aptcoin/stratum-mining.git

Follow normal pool setup instructions (for example the MPos quickstart guide), but using our stratum-mining module instead.  The steps differ only a little bit:

cd stratum-mining
git submodule init
git submodule update

cd externals/aptcoin_scrypt
sudo python setup.py install

cd ../stratum
sudo python setup.py install

Then add your config file to stratum-mining/conf/config.py (be sure to specify 'scrypt-nm' instead of 'scrypt' though) and start the pool.

This does not affect the pool front end that you're using.

This does not require a new Aptcoin release, however it won't hurt to update your CPUminer if you're going to mine against a pool.  Our version is here:

https://github.com/aptcoin/cpuminer.git

Questions, comments, problems?  Let us know!

Be sure that the aptcoin.conf file is in place on your platform.  The addnodes are often needed for a bootstrap into the network, although it hasn't been as much of an issue lately.   This tutorial may help:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=743731.msg8426727#msg8426727

The Cryptex Link:

https://cryptex.biz/market/91

The Askcoin Link:

https://askcoin.net/trading/APT/BTC

We're going to updating the OP with better images and information soon.