From what I can see, IFC is now alive and running fine. The current block is: 251454
With v1.7 I am able to pick up the old blockchain, sync to current and solo mine, and I did *not* need to mass download any blockchains, nor even any special addnodes. (It found everything by itself). This is not a fork that monocolor plucked out of nowhere -- rather he found it on the network, probably from a solo miner(s) that turned on his wallet at the right time and managed to route around the stall, by computing enough blocks while they were synchronizing, to get ahead of it. This reflects a working as designed p2p recovery from the situation.
Note that if you had the wallet active right up to the stall, it's probably a good idea to delete the old block database and re-download (note: KEEP your wallet.dat and .conf files!). (and I mean download via the standard wallet sync-ing, not that file from mega.nz)
This pool is on the active chain:
http://coin-base.net/infinitecoin/These pools are on the broken series:
http://infinite.netcoin.pl/https://ifc.epools.org/http://ifc.scryptmining.com/Also remember that the block explorers, coin chooser sites, etc showing the old series may not even be upgraded to the v1.7 software yet.
The old stalled/bad block (246953/4) has little chance of proceeding because the diff is ultra-high and still climbing, and noone is mining at those stalled pools now anyways.
It seems probable that some big pools/miners/exchange sites, including Cryptsy were caught out by the rapid flurry of releases and did not upgrade fast enough to v1.7, which contributed to the forks.
If a few blocks got orphaned around 246953 (perhaps a total 5?), that's fairly inconsequential. From what I understand, for anyone who had txns inside those orphaned blocks, the txns will either be in the new blocks, or if they never registered then the coins will be back in your wallet. (might have to rescan/reindex wallet). The coins don't just disappear!
Also note: trades happening inside Cryptsy (with coins already there) are purely on those internal accounts, and don't affect the blockchain. I would recommend holding off any transfers to/from your exchange until confirmed they are on the active chain. (you can also send a small test amount first).
The new difficulty algorithm from PPCoin, active since block 248000, looks good and is oscillating up and down nicely so far, and climbing up. Any coin is going to have problems with mass surge-waves of hashing - an easy, perfect solution to that is not known. Fisheater has done a commendable job of responding quickly, and the PPC algorithm should be a robust improvement.
I'm not sure more checkpoints will help right now, and it could induce yet another fork point if miners fail to upgrade in time. Depends on how strongly the community wants such a confidence booster from you, fisheater.
