Now that we are done with the pleasantries,
can we go back to GAM?
Maybe one of the GAM hodlers has a question for the dev?

because you are not on Slack, the dev has posted many times since then, at least till end last week (Aug 20).

Actually the burn rate originally would take just over 1 year at the price (just over ICO) but with the low price now
it might be within 1/2 year that these tokens start becoming scarce and the price only goes up due to buys for burns.
So, the low price is good for speeding this up!

Someone got impatient and sold a large amount (or they needed the money badly)
so that caused the price to drop. It is already recovering slowly and with the
continued buys (burns) the price will eventually go up, but only with patience can you profit from that...

I did not see the last burn mentioned here that Gambitdev posted on the Slack yesterday:
While it was a long period between the last burn, it was the largest burn so far. 
25.07% total supply burned.
2500000 starting supply
2505564.11785233 current total supply

Tokens burned on 8-12-2015:  34,107
Total burned: 628,114
1877449.73 available supply in circulation.

I expect that the burning will never stop, I mean that at some point it may be unfeasible to continue for some reason,
but not because the tokens run out. Towards the end of the coin supply, the price of coins will simply rise higher and higher, so
the amount of BTC needed to buy the last coins will go up all the time.
Look even at the market spread today: there are 10.4 GAM offered for 1 BTC *each* !!!
If we really get down to the last few GAM, don't you think that they will continue to go up in price,
so that the last GAM will never ever sell to be burned, it will be ever smaller fractions and the price of GAM will continue to go up with it becoming more and more rare. No, there is no need to do anything else when we are nearing the end - the end will simply move away, this is a self-balancing system and it will work great.

Looking at the performance of the GAM Network, I want to congratulate the GAM team, dev and coders, with the swift action last week when the network was slowing down due to the increasing block value, leading to a reductoin of number of blocks.
The value per input has been steadily decreasing in my wallet and the diff has been increasing, also showing in the duration before staking.
It used to be that every block that became mature immediately staked, now I have smaller inputs that are coming up on a week old soon. All inputs value has been going down from 1k+ GAM chunks by being divided in half, at this moment all inputs are below 160 and those are staking more often, moving everything to below 80 GAM inputs, so the diff and the number of inputs is still rising - until the burn rate will take over and the amount of GAM will be reduced enough to make it more rare. But that will take a couple months.
Congrats again and I am happy with the network stability now.

Oh but there were days that GAM moved more than 10 BTC and it has already reached over 27k Sat level, so if you invested even 5 BTC in the ICO, that was worth almost 14 BTC at that peak and it will be high in value after enough burn of tokens is reducing total coin supply in a couple months.

Burns will increase, coin supply will diminish and value will go up.
But yeah - many chase after a quick profit and forego the slow and steady rises, which often are better in the long run.
I am sure to stay in GAM for the long haul and HODL. You do what you think best. Success.

That sounds like you are stuck at block 72177 which is the last block of V1.0.0.0
so I suspect that the new wallet you downloaded is *not* the v1.1
Remember that for a short while there was a v1.0.1 which was an attempt to speed up the network
without mandatory update, but it was not enough so it has been removed and now only V1.1 will be able
to participate in the network.
Please download fresh from the latest announcement and make sure that the wallet you are running
shows Version 1.1.0.0 when you go to Help -> About Gambit

Anyone still running the 1.0 wallet will see that it no longer syncs, because there is a mandatory upgrade to 1.1 to get the blocks moving again. The slack has the link, but I expect that Collin will also post it here soon.

Aaaaand we're moving again (after almost a day without no blocks)
It appears that the first staked block (nr 72171) received 2.54 GAM
I thought the max was 2.5???
Anyway happy to see progress again!

There is a new wallet for Linux available already; Windows and other OS'es are in the making.
The only change is that the wallet will not combine as many inputs, so more inputs remain available and more blocks will be generated,
which will help the network go back to a normal staking routine instead of what happened last night with 12 hours no block until
finally someone brought another wallet online. Ouch!
From time to time you will see a string of a dozen or so blocks quickly following each other, with long periods of waiting in between.
That is because all wallets have fallen into the state where they combine inputs into ~1000 GAM blocks so a wallet with 10,000 GAM will only produce ~10 blocks and then it will need 500 blocks generated by other wallets before those blocks come back out of staking.
The new threshold has been set to 50 GAM, so first the wallet will split inputs in 2 until they reach the new target size and then a 10,000 GAM wallet will generate approx 200 blocks so even if only a few wallets are staking, the network keeps ticking. Today there is need of more than 500,000 GAM being staking at the same time for the network to keep going, due to the 1000 GAM block size and the 510 confirm maturity threshold. So, you can also see that burning GAM would increase the problem and the block value target needed to be lowered to keep enough blocks going.
There is a link to the Linux wallets on the Gambit slack and I hope that Windows is soon available as well.

As you can see from the regular updates and compare to the growth in the supply,
burning is much larger than mining.
That is why the percentage of total coin supply that is burned is increasing each week.
Hope this clarifies,

OK, my wallet staked all its inputs within an hour or so, hopefully enough wallets remain online to keep the block chain moving. I don't know if my wallet has split the inputs - I doubt it because last time it also created only ~1k GAM size blocks so the number of inputs is minimal, in contrast to a few weeks ago when I had 1000+ inputs from splitting. We need that again!
I don't know if it is a network configuration or requires a wallet update to encourage or force the wallet to split inputs in a certain size, different than the default 1k GAM? If that can be set to 100 GAM then we suddenly get 10 times more inputs and enough blocks will be generated to go back to design parameters (1 block per minute).
It may even be just a hidden console command that needs to be issued to get the wallet into this desired behavior?

The GAM block chain is moving again, albeit slowly, due to a couple more wallets that have been brought online. Hopefully we will be able to generate enough blocks to get the staked blocks to maturity and start quicker cycles once the blocks are younger and they are being split by the wallets.
Edit:
After a couple dozen blocks, the block chain has slowed down again - already 40 mins since the last block. We need a couple more wallets online, so we can make some progress. In 40 blocks my wallet will start staking again, though at this pace it will take a while before that happens!

The wallet and network is not designed for being off-line for a long time and then being brought online for a short time, because when the wallet sees old, high-reward blocks it apparently starts assembling a lot of inputs into a few larger (~1k GAM) blocks, so the result is that a wallet with 10k GAM, instead of having 1000 or so small inputs, will end up with 10 big inputs. So, next time the wallet comes online it will generate 10 blocks and then it is done. If many people do this, then not enough blocks are generated to mature the staked inputs (which need 510 confirms before be ing allowed to participate in staking again) so if there are 20 or 30 wallets that are used for staking but only brought online every other day or so, they might each contribute a few dozen blocks (approx 1 block per 1k GAM) so there is a risk like now that even after a few days, not enough blocks have been generated to mature the blocks are we have a catch-22 until more wallets are being brought online to allow a few wallets to mature *BUT* there is a risk that those wallets will see old inputs and instead of splitting inputs and creating more blocks in future (each input can generate a block if not re-combined) the wallets may get locked into a state where too few blocks are created, so all available inputs for staking are old and the wallets see that inputs are too old (which normally means that they are too small to stake quickly) so they combine inputs to make bigger inputs to stake faster - only making the problem worse.
NOTE that this presumes that the wallet checks the *date* of the input. I did not check the code to see if the date or Nr of Confirms is used for deciding to split or re-combine, so this risk may not happen if indeed the wallet is looking at the confirms instead of date.
Who can bring more wallets online? It has been 2 hours since the last block (instead of 1 per minute). At his rate, you can't even move the GAM in or out the wallet without waiting for hours!
BTW, block 71835 is the long awaited one...

Exactly and at this moment every little bit helps. It has been 1.5 hours without block found, so any wallet that can be brought online with blocks ready to stake is welcome - more wallets need to stay online & stake!

We need more wallets online continously!
It has been 2 days since I staked all my GAM and only ~300 blocks have been generated since then, sometimes only 1 or 2 blocks per hour. This means that instead of after ~8.5 hours, it might take 3 days before the necessary 510 blocks have passed.
With more wallets online, more inputs are generated and blocks will be created closer to the 1 min design rate.

Somebody is losing patience - trading at 14k and jumping back to 17k...