BigCoin is an independent proof-of-work blockchain, forked from Bitcoin Core 31.1, with its own genesis block mined on 21 Oct 2026. It shares no history with Bitcoin. It has been running continuously since launch and is past block 6,000 at the time of writing.
There is no ICO, no presale, no airdrop and nothing for sale. I am announcing it here because this is traditionally where one announces such things.
What it is- A full fork of Bitcoin Core 31.1 ("BigCoin Core"), MIT licensed, source on GitHub
- A fully independent chain: own genesis, own network magic, own ports and address formats
- Bitcoin's economics unchanged: 50 BIG per block, halving every 210,000 blocks, 10-minute target, 2016-block retarget
- All Bitcoin softforks (SegWit, Taproot, ...) active from genesis
What it is not- Nothing is for sale. There is no ICO, no presale, and I will never sell my own coins
- There are no promises. I make no claims about what BIG is worth or will ever be worth
- Nothing technically novel. If you are looking for innovation, this is not it. It is a small, clean, honestly run chain - that is the whole pitch.
Founder reward - full disclosureBlock 1 pays a founder reward of 1,000,000 BIG to my address. This is hard-coded in consensus, documented in the README, and displayed in a permanent banner on the block explorer. Including it, the supply cap is about 22,000,000 BIG. These coins are not for sale - my policy is the original one: publish the software, mine, maintain, and never sell.
SpecificationsTicker BIG
PoW SHA-256d (same as Bitcoin)
Supply cap ~22,000,000 BIG (21M mineable + 1M disclosed founder reward)
Block reward 50 BIG, halves every 210,000 blocks
Block interval 10 minutes target, retarget every 2016 blocks
Launch difficulty CPU-minable (genesis nBits 0x1f00ffff)
P2P port 8338
Addresses bech32 "big1..." / base58 starting with "B"
Genesis (21 Oct 2026)
000086c5bc212db5bf8760b3fb3a30dfcd6af76257fd529814bc032c8134424d
Source code (MIT):
https://github.com/bigcoin77/bigcoinReleases (Windows binaries, v1.1):
https://github.com/bigcoin77/bigcoin/releasesBigCoin-win64.zip SHA256: 1e4acd36784de01177208bc961421b18048b22498327986263a83b0a5b3eacce
Block explorer:
http://133.242.139.204/Seed node: 133.242.139.204:8338
These, plus GitHub issues, are the only official channels. There is no Telegram, no Discord, and no token on any other chain. Anything else using the BigCoin name is not me.
Running a nodeWindows: download the release zip and run bitcoind.exe - the bundled bitcoin.conf already points at the seed node.
Linux: build from source exactly like Bitcoin Core (see the repo docs).
Manual connection: addnode=133.242.139.204:8338
MiningThe chain launched CPU-minable. A miner with real hardware showed up within hours of the v1.0 release and difficulty has been rising at the maximum allowed rate ever since, so the CPU era is effectively over. Standard solo mining works (getblocktemplate, or the built-in generatetoaddress RPC). There is no pool; anyone is free to run one, but it will not be mine.
Known quirks, disclosedBitcoin's retarget arithmetic was never designed for a CPU-minable genesis target: the 256-bit multiplication overflows while the target is very large, which made the first retarget jump x21 instead of the expected x1.24. Every node computes the same result, so consensus was never at risk, and difficulty has since risen out of the affected range. v1.1 fixed a header-sync issue this caused, and also pins the hashes of blocks 1 / 1000 / 2000 (replacing the checkpoint system that upstream removed), so settled early history cannot be reorganized. Details are in the release notes.
WhyI wanted a chain run the way the original was run at the start: release the code, mine, keep it alive, sell nothing, promise nothing. Whether that is worth anything is not for me to say.
Questions are welcome, including hostile ones. I will answer honestly.
- Masashi Takamoto (GitHub:
https://github.com/bigcoin77 - note: the bitcointalk user "bigcoin77" is not me)
