Gridcoin 3.7+ keeps forking and a possible solution
It seems like every day I'm on a fork. Today, I have the most bizarre version: being 9 hours behind gridcoinstats, with a difficulty of exactly 0. Gridcoinstats is also reporting current difficulty < 0.35.
While I have been diligently updating, most of my current peers have not. Only a small minority are running 3.7.5.x. One is even running 3.6.3.x! I'm wondering whether, in wake of the recent hard fork, the lack of synchronized versions is causing the repeated forking. If so, I think we should have a mandatory 3.8.0.0 version regardless of whether 3.7.[1-4].0 are causing f orks. The twist is that 3.8.0.0 will refuse to connect to nonupdated clients (with a short grace period) and have a mechanism to inform users of future required updates as they occur. The idea is to keep the network as synchronized as possible to prevent forks.
At least I am not the only one sitting on forks for days.
I just restarted Gridcoin and am now rebuilding my chain. So far, so good. Difficulty now > 0 and the last block was generated 2 days ago. So, while my recent PoR rewards have vanished (again), it looks like I'm rejoining the proper chain.
The good news is, your POR rewards are not lost, they were just assigned to a vanished chain. Once everything is copacetic again - you should have access to your coins still.
In other words: Your boinc work still counts.
UPDATE: After the restart, I got stuck again on a fork. The giveaway was that the first block was taking forever (or so it seemed) to be processed. This morning, I figured I was on a fork, so I restarted again. This time, after starting 500 blocks later than the first time, the blocks were processed rapidly. Interestingly, my client went back 500 blocks to the previous restart's beginning point. Nonetheless, it rapidly moved forward to the current block. I just verified that I'm on the current block. In the meantime, my magnitude increased and I received a large PoR reward. :-)
I got onto another fork today. What fun! A restart fixed the problem.