this announcement cause the market rally maybe 

I think ripplelabs is a much better ally than stellar. Stellar is basically a ripoff of 2 years of development by Ripple Labs. ripple labs only problem is actually Jed in the first place, that use his 10% stake in XRP to manipulate the market and as leverage against RL to try and find success with stellar. the other 70b ripple that RL hold is in good hands. They believe in the ripple and are committed to furthering the protocol and forming partnerships with pre-existing financial institutions. so far: Gold bullion international and Fidor bank.

It's kind of strange that a delegate can change it's pay rate automatically, arbitrarily. but I agree with OP they should be able to increase. If you make adjustment slow it should be fine. the actual pay could be a moving average of it's rate or just make it so the rate can only adjust by a fixed amount per day.

this is a good metric. If published though may help to rally bts x market.  I think it should be possible to keep a running total of all first spends of inputs in the chain to get part way there. excludes those that important their keys but don't spend, but that means they don't care to vote right, which would be small total.

Since this thread is being revived, I'd like to request someone tell the number of confirmations btc38 uses to credit you for pts deposit.

I'm thinking about starting cpu mining once difficulty drops. my concern that there will be significantly under 5 minute blocks. My rough estimate is that it is ~30 seconds to calculate and store 2^23 sha512 hashes. If that's true and the yam miner is calculating on each mining thread a full set of sha512 hashes from a unique midhash, a faster block generation rate will cause it's mining performance to suffer.