My bro in law said he stopped mining, but the difficulty is still 5x higher than what it started at. Is he lying/mistaken?
Also, I'm wondering, since the difficulty isn't going down, what are my options on increasing my hps? I looked into cgminer but I don't know if that's the solution.
What algo are you using exactly? SHA256D, Scrypt? Using cgminer would be much quicker than the built-in miner. Also which coin did you clone this from?
The reason the difficulty is still 5x and not going down because your coin has to mine a certain number of blocks before the difficulty retargets down. For Bitcoin its 14 days. It takes the average hashrate for the last 14 days worth of blocks and re-evaulates whether it needs a new difficulty or not.
Just keep mining and eventually after a day or so , it will go down. Any reason why you are doing this?