[ANN] PCoin (PCN) - RandomX CPU mining | Bitcoin economics

What it is

PCoin is an independent Layer-1 blockchain. Own genesis block, own network magic,
own ports, own address prefixes, own UTXO set. It is not a token, not an ERC-20,
not a sidechain, and it does not settle on anyone else's chain.

It is a fork of the Bitcoin Core v29.4 codebase with proof-of-work replaced by
RandomX - the same CPU-friendly, ASIC-resistant algorithm Monero uses.
Bitcoin's economics are kept exactly as they are: 21,000,000 cap, 50 PCN block
reward, halving every 210,000 blocks, 600-second target spacing.

The point is narrow and I will state it plainly: Bitcoin proved neutral digital
money works, and then mining it moved to industrial ASIC farms. PCoin restarts
that experiment with one change - the hardware you already own is the mining
hardware. A laptop competes. An Android phone competes.

Honest status - read this before anything else

There is no exchange listing. PCN is not traded anywhere. There is no
price, no market, no volume, and nothing to speculate on today. I applied to
CoinMarketCap on 9 August; they replied that an asset must trade on an exchange
feeding them data, and offered a paid fast-track for USD 5,000, which I declined.
That is the honest state of it.
There is no mining pool yet. Mining is solo only, using the miner built
into the node. On a young chain that means real variance - a small CPU may wait
days between blocks. A pool is being written and is the next thing I ship; the
share validator and block assembly are working and tested against the live chain,
but it is not accepting miners yet. I will post here when it is.
The chain is young. Launched 1 August 2026. At the time of writing it
is around height 3,222 - about twelve days old.
Supply is concentrated. The largest single address holds about 43% of
coins, and roughly 75% is attributable to me across several addresses. It is not
a premine and not an allocation - for the first weeks I was very nearly the only
person mining, and anyone mining from block 1 could have earned the same share.
It falls as others join. Details and how to check it yourself are below.

If you are here for a pump, this is the wrong thread. If you want to point a CPU
at a young chain and see what happens, read on.

Specifications

Ticker	PCN
Algorithm	RandomX (key "PCoin/RandomX/v1"), CPU-friendly, ASIC-resistant
Block IDs	double-SHA256 (unchanged); only the PoW hash is RandomX
Max supply	21,000,000 PCN
Block reward	50 PCN
Halving	every 210,000 blocks
Block time	600 seconds target
Difficulty	LWMA, retargeting EVERY block. Active since height 2800. Below 2800 the chain used Bitcoin's 2016-block retarget
Coinbase maturity	100 blocks
P2P port	9444
RPC port	9443 (note: P2P minus one, not plus one)
Address format	bech32, prefix pc1
Config file	pcoin.conf (NOT bitcoin.conf - a node handed the wrong name ignores it silently)
Data directory	~/.pcoin on Linux, %LOCALAPPDATA%\PCoin on Windows
Premine	None. Zero. Every coin mined from block 1.

Genesis timestamp: "PCoin 01/Aug/2026 an independent chain is born"

The three consensus differences from Bitcoin Core v29.4

1. RandomX proof-of-work - active from genesis. See
src/crypto/pow_randomx.cpp. Block IDs remain double-SHA256, so every RPC
hash you are used to is unchanged; only the PoW check differs. The RandomX key is
the fixed string "PCoin/RandomX/v1" and never rotates, unlike Monero's 2048-block
re-key - so a pool or a miner builds the VM once.

2. LWMA difficulty - active since height 2800. Above that height
difficulty retargets every block instead of every 2016. A two-week retarget
window is far too slow for a chain with little hashrate; a single miner arriving
or leaving otherwise distorts the chain for days. The rollout was height-gated
and every node followed it without a split. See src/pow.cpp and
consensus.lwmaHeight in src/kernel/chainparams.cpp.

3. Future-block-time limit - tightened from Bitcoin's 2 hours to 15
minutes at that same height 2800. Below it, the 2-hour rule still applied. It was
height-gated deliberately: an ungated change would have split the network.

Everything else - the UTXO model, script, SegWit, the wallet, the RPC surface -
is upstream Bitcoin Core and behaves the way you expect.

How to mine (5 minutes)

There is no separate miner to install. The miner is built into the node.

Linux (Debian/Ubuntu) - one line, verifies its own download against the
release checksums and then runs a setup wizard:

Code:

curl -fsSL https://pc.am/dl/install.sh | sudo sh

Windows - portable zip with the node, the CLI and a tray miner:
pcoin-win64-miner.zip
Or the scripted install, which pins and verifies the hash:

Code:

powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File install.ps1

(install.ps1 is at pc.am/dl/install.ps1.)
Mining is OFF by default on purpose - a node that mines before it has synced is
building on a chain it has not verified. Turn it on from the tray once synced.

There is no .exe installer and there will not be one. The Inno Setup stub was
being flagged by a Defender machine-learning heuristic as a reputation false
positive, so the installer was dropped and the zip is the only Windows artifact.
Note the binaries are unsigned, so SmartScreen will warn on first run.

Android:
miner APK |
wallet APK
Uninstalling the app destroys the wallet in app-private storage, so write your
recovery phrase down first.

Manual Linux control, if you skipped the wizard:

Code:

alias pcli='sudo -u pcoin pcoin-cli -datadir=/var/lib/pcoin'
pcli createwallet "main"
ADDR=$(pcli getnewaddress)
pcli startmining "$ADDR" 4        # 4 threads; 0 = all cores
pcli getcpuminerinfo

Build from source:

Code:

git clone https://github.com/pars5555/pcoin
cd pcoin
cmake -B build -DBUILD_GUI=OFF -DENABLE_WALLET=ON -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
cmake --build build -j$(nproc)

Binaries keep their upstream names (bitcoind, bitcoin-cli). If you also run
Bitcoin Core, always pass -datadir explicitly.

Verify everything yourself

I would rather you checked than took my word.

Supply - published as bare-number endpoints, generated from a full node
and refreshed every 10 minutes:

Code:

https://pc.am/supply/circulating.txt
https://pc.am/supply/total.txt
https://pc.am/supply/immature.txt
https://pc.am/supply/max.txt
https://pc.am/supply/supply.json     (includes the written methodology)

circulating = total minus immature, because the most recent 100 coinbases are
consensus-unspendable until they mature. No locked, vested or reserved supply
exists, so nothing else is deducted. At the time of writing: 160,900 total,
5,000 immature, 155,900 circulating.

Distribution - as of 13 August 2026, 44 addresses hold a balance. The
largest holds about 43% of supply and roughly 75% is mine across several
addresses. explorer.pc.am - look whenever you like.

One thing worth understanding if you check later and get a different number: like
any Bitcoin-derived wallet, mine rotates its change address on every spend, so
"the big address" is not a fixed address and the top-address percentage moves
whenever I pay for anything. Judge the concentration on the total across
addresses, not on one address you saw quoted in a forum post.

The diff against upstream - the public repo is a squashed import, so
git diff v29.4..main will not work directly. Do this instead:

Code:

git clone https://github.com/pars5555/pcoin && cd pcoin
git remote add upstream https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin
git fetch upstream tag v29.4
git diff v29.4..main -- src/

Releases are published with SHA-256 checksums. Android APKs are signed
with certificate SHA-256

Code:

2dc08424507c08c12f5afb7ce7328d5f4fec772dde04de40d69a69e8dcaccb32

which you can confirm yourself with apksigner verify --print-certs.
Checksums prove the file is intact; they are not signatures, and the builds are
not reproducible yet. Both gaps are stated in doc/REPRODUCIBLE-BUILDS.md rather
than glossed over.

What you can actually do with it today

Not a market, and I want to be careful with the wording: PCN currently buys
credit in four services I run - an uptime checker, a Telegram website-builder
bot, an AI control panel, and a 3D-model generator. Each publishes a deposit
address, waits for confirmations, reads a rate at credit time and stamps the rate
it used on the record. The integration guide is public at
docs.pc.am if you want to accept PCN somewhere too.

That is a use, not a price. It is an internal credit rate I set, not an
orderbook, and nobody should read it as a valuation.

What is coming, and what is not promised

A mining pool - the honest gap, and the next thing I ship. RandomX over
a Bitcoin-style header means no existing pool software works unmodified, so it
needed writing. The share validator agrees with the chain on 100 real blocks and
the block assembly is accepted by a node; what remains is the share accounting
and payouts. Solo mining stays supported and is not going away.
Seeds run by other people - all three DNS/fixed seeds are mine today.
Existing nodes keep their peers if I vanish, but new nodes would struggle to
bootstrap. If you run a stable node and want to be a seed, say so.

Not promised: a listing, a price, a partnership, or a date for any of them.

Who

One developer. No company, no team, no investors, nothing sold to anyone. If
that is disqualifying for you, that is a reasonable position to hold.

Questions here or on Telegram. If you find a bug in consensus code I want to
hear about it more than I want a compliment.

pc.am