PCoin (PCN) - RandomX over an 80-byte Bitcoin header, CPU-only, 100% to minersThis is a mining thread, not an ANN - the ANN is linked at the bottom. What follows is what you need to actually point cores at it, plus the numbers to decide whether you want to.
The one thing that makes it differentPCoin is a Bitcoin Core v29.4 fork with the proof of work swapped for RandomX. The hash is Monero-shaped and everything around it is Bitcoin-shaped: RandomX runs over the
80-byte serialised block header, not a CryptoNote blob. Block IDs are still double-SHA256 - only the PoW check is RandomX.
Two consequences, if you are integrating a miner rather than just running one:
- the RandomX key is the fixed 16-byte ASCII string
PCoin/RandomX/v1 and
never rotates - no seed height, no dataset transition, none of Monero's 2048-block re-key dance
- nonce is uint32 LE at
offset 76. Miss it and CryptoNote's offset 39 writes the nonce inside the merkle root - hashes look perfectly healthy and not one share is ever valid
How to mine it - two ways1. The node's own miner. Supported, every platform, no separate miner and no pool needed:
bitcoind -datadir=<dir> -daemon
bitcoin-cli startmining "<your pc1q... address>" 0
Threads 0 = all cores. It pays a bare address, so the machine holds no key.
2. xmrigCC with rx/pcoin. Third-party, Linux, and
open upstream, not merged - treat a binary from a stranger's fork accordingly:
PR:
https://github.com/Bendr0id/xmrigCC/pull/435Build:
https://github.com/pars5555/xmrigCC/releases/tag/rx-pcoin-v1./xmrigMiner -o pool.pc.am:3333 -u <your pc1q... address> -a rx/pcoin -t 4
No Windows build from me: the prebuilt xmrig deps are UCRT-linked and Ubuntu ships no UCRT mingw compiler. On Windows use the node's miner, or build the branch with MSVC.
If you tried xmrig against the pool before 17 Aug and got nothing, that was my bug. The pool rejected 100% of shares from standard xmrig with "share above target" while the miner hashed perfectly - it rebuilt the header with the nonce bytes in the opposite order from the xmrig convention. My node's miner and my pool were written from the same wrong assumption, so they agreed with each other and it stayed invisible until a third-party miner existed. Both orders are accepted now. Worth retrying.
The poolstratum+tcp://pool.pc.am:3333 - username is your PCN address, password anything.
- fee
2%,
PPLNS, payout every block found, minimum payout 0.00000294 PCN
- vardiff, target 15 s per share
- stats plus a MiningCore-shaped JSON API:
https://pool.pc.am and
https://pool.pc.am/api/pools- currently
31 miners, 238,617 H/s, which is 34.2% of network hashrate
Solo mining is equally fine - the node miner above needs no pool at all. I would honestly rather people spread out than all land on mine; see the disclosures.
Live numbers, right now- height
4349, difficulty 0.12409
- network hashrate
696,872 H/s- observed spacing over the last 300 blocks:
561 s, against a 600 s target
- total emission at that pace: about
7,694 PCN/day, shared by everyone
- circulating supply 212,450 PCN
Work out your own share rather than trusting my arithmetic:(your H/s / networkHashrate from https://pool.pc.am/api/pools) x 7,694
At today's numbers that is roughly
11.0 PCN/day per 1 kH/s, 110 per 10 kH/s. Network hashrate has roughly tripled in a week, so that figure is wrong by the weekend. Recompute it.
Coinbase maturity is 100 blocks, so about 16 h at current pace before anything you mine is spendable.
LWMA every block - what it actually changes for youDifficulty retargets
every single block (LWMA, N=60), not every 2016. What that means in practice:
- no 2016-block cliff to time. Point hardware whenever you like; difficulty absorbs you within the hour
- leaving hurts less. A big miner dropping off does not strand the chain for days - the decrease clamp is 12x per block
- the increase clamp is 3x per block, so a hashrate spike cannot lock everyone out either
-
block timestamps are not monotonic in height on this chain - consensus only requires greater than median-time-past. "Time since last block" can come out negative. Do not panic, and do not build a monitor that assumes otherwise
- one-block reorgs are routine, not exceptional. Anything that walks the chain must handle them from day one
Economics50 PCN per block, halving every 210,000 blocks, 21,000,000 cap, 600 s target - untouched from Bitcoin.
No premine, no ICO, no founder allocation, no dev fee, no masternodes. 100% of the block reward goes to whoever mined it.
Three disclosures I would rather make than have you find1. There is no exchange. No orderbook, no volume, no market cap, no way to sell PCN for cash. If what you want is money, mine something else - genuinely.
What does exist, and I will not overstate it: four services I run accept PCN as payment at a published rate (
https://price.pc.am, currently $0.0160/PCN). That is a redemption rate for those services' own credits, set by me - not a market price discovered by strangers trading. It is worth what those services are worth to you and nothing more.
2. One miner currently holds a majority of block production, and it is not me. Measured over the last 150 blocks as I write this: a single solo address found
64% of them (95% CI 56-72%), and my pool found 35%. That address mined nothing at all before height 4114 and has held roughly seven blocks in ten since.
A miner above 50% can reorganise recent blocks and reverse a payment that already looked settled.
Nothing has gone wrong - the explorer reports reorg_count 0, no blocks unwound, supply exact against height - and the likeliest explanation is dull, someone with real CPU capacity pointing it at a chain that is free to mine. But capability is capability: if you are accepting PCN for anything that matters, wait deeper than you would on a chain with spread-out hashrate, and watch for reorgs rather than trusting depth alone. Against a party at 70% no depth is provably safe - waiting buys time and cost, not certainty.
More independent miners, and a second pool run by somebody who is not me, are the only real fixes. The pool code is MIT and I will help anyone who wants to stand one up.
3. It is 18 days old. Genesis was 1 Aug 2026. Every "all time" number about this chain describes a fortnight.
Verify all of it - every coinbase is public:
https://explorer.pc.am - and
use a window of several hundred blocks. 60 is pure sampling noise, which I know because I published a wrong number off a 60-block sample and had to correct it.
LinksSource:
https://github.com/pars5555/pcoinSite:
https://pc.am | Explorer:
https://explorer.pc.am | Pool:
https://pool.pc.amMiner integration spec and test vectors:
https://github.com/pars5555/pcoin/blob/main/contrib/pool/MINER-INTEGRATION.mdHappy to answer anything technical in here.
