The coin anyone can mine.
PCoin (PCN) is its own blockchain — not a token. It keeps Bitcoin's economics and swaps the proof-of-work for RandomX, the CPU-fair algorithm. Ordinary processors are the best miners. If you own a phone or a laptop, you can mine PCN.
Money creation, for ordinary people
Bitcoin proved that neutral digital money works — but mining it now belongs to industrial ASIC farms. PCoin restarts that experiment with one change: the hardware you already own is the mining hardware. No ASIC farms, no premine, no investors.
Fair by physics
RandomX runs randomly generated programs over a large memory working set. That kills the ASIC advantage and mostly neutralizes GPUs — a general-purpose CPU is the best miner. Fairness is enforced by the algorithm itself, not by a promise.
Proven, boring economics
Bitcoin's monetary rules, untouched: 21,000,000 coins, 50 PCN subsidy halving every 210,000 blocks, 10-minute blocks. No tail emission, no founder's cut, no governance knobs. Boring is the point.
Community from zero
Every node validates every block; every node is equal. There is no foundation and no privileged key. The founder's role dissolves as the network grows — the goal is a chain nobody controls, including the person who started it.
The best mining chip is the one in your pocket
Most proof-of-work coins are mined by special-purpose chips (ASICs) that are millions of times faster than your computer. PCoin uses RandomX — the algorithm pioneered by Monero — which is deliberately built so that an ordinary CPU is the most efficient miner there is.
PCoin runs RandomX with the fixed key PCoin/RandomX/v1 and verifies blocks in light mode with a 256 MB cache — small enough to fit comfortably on a modern phone. Block IDs stay double-SHA256; only the proof-of-work check uses RandomX.
Difficulty retargets on every block (LWMA, live since height 2800) to hold a 10-minute average against whatever hashrate the community's CPUs provide. It is currently around 1,900× the launch floor, so a single phone now contributes to a shared effort rather than finding blocks alone — what a phone earns tracks its share of total hashrate, not a fixed rate.
-
No ASICs. Random program execution over big memory removes the efficiency edge special hardware depends on.
-
No extra software. The built-in miner (bitcoin-cli generatetoaddress) grinds real RandomX blocks. External miners like xmrig do not work — they speak Monero's protocol, not PCoin's.
-
256 MB is enough. Light-mode verification fits on phones, laptops, and small servers alike — every device can be a full participant.
| Device | Hashes / second |
|---|---|
| Desktop, 16 threads, 2 GB fast mode | 2,518 |
| Galaxy Z Flip 5 (flagship) | 144 |
| Pixel 4a (2020 mid-range) | 51 |
| moto g play 2024 (budget) | 43 |
| Galaxy A03 (entry level) | 15 |
What would your device actually do?
Pick a device and how much of it you want to give up. Entries under measured were read straight off those devices running this software; the rest are estimates anchored on them, good to roughly 20%. Difficulty is read live from the explorer, so the answer is against the real network as it is right now.
Reading live figures from the explorer…
Paid for the work you did, not the block you found
Mining alone is a lottery. Your computer either finds a whole block and earns the full reward, or it finds nothing — and there is no partial credit. A typical PC can wait days between wins. Most people install a miner, watch zero for a week, and conclude it is broken.
A pool fixes that. Everyone points their mining at one coordinator, which hands out work that is deliberately easier than a real block. Each easy solution you send back is called a share: it is worth nothing by itself, but it is proof you did the work. When anyone in the pool finds a real block, the reward is split across everyone in proportion to the shares they contributed.
You are paid for your work, whether or not you were the lucky one. The same earnings, arriving steadily instead of rarely.
It does not increase your earnings. It reduces variance. After the pool fee you will earn slightly less on average than mining alone. What you are buying is predictability, and that is the whole product.
It does not make the chain faster. Block spacing is set by the difficulty algorithm, not by how miners organise.
It concentrates hashrate, and on a network this small that is a real risk rather than a theoretical one. A pool holding a majority of the network is the 51% problem it was meant to reduce. We publish the pool’s hashrate and the network’s at pool.pc.am/api/pools, so its share is checkable rather than claimed, and we would rather see a second pool run by somebody else than grow this one.
You do not need separate mining software — it is built into the PCoin node. You do need
a recent enough node: startpoolmining ships from v1.3.0, and
both the node and bitcoin-cli must be that version or newer. An older
CLI sends the thread count as text and the call fails with a type error, even against a
new node. If in doubt, reinstall from the Download section above.
Windows (PowerShell) — the binaries keep their upstream names, and the install directory depends on whether the installer had administrator rights:
$P = if (Test-Path C:\PCoin\bitcoin-cli.exe) { 'C:\PCoin' } else { "$env:LOCALAPPDATA\PCoin" }
& "$P\bitcoin-cli.exe" -datadir="$P\data" `
startpoolmining "pool.pc.am:3333" "<your pc1q… address>" 4Linux — the .deb installs the CLI as
pcoin-cli:
sudo -u pcoin pcoin-cli -datadir=/var/lib/pcoin \
startpoolmining "pool.pc.am:3333" "<your pc1q… address>" 4
The last number is how many CPU threads to use; 0 means every core.
stopmining stops it, and startmining "<your address>" 4 puts
you back on solo.
Both the Windows tray and the Linux service re-issue mining whenever the node restarts, and what they re-issue is solo unless the config says otherwise. So a machine set up with the command above mines for the pool until its first reboot and then quietly goes back to paying its own address, with nothing anywhere saying so. Add one line:
Linux /etc/pcoin/miner.conf POOL_URL=pool.pc.am:3333
Windows C:\PCoin\pcoin-tray.cfg poolurl=pool.pc.am:3333
Then sudo systemctl restart pcoin-miner on Linux, or restart the tray on
Windows. Leave the line out — or empty — and you stay on solo, which is the default and
what every existing install keeps.
It returns before it has connected. The command answers immediately with a status of
starting, which is not yet success. Run getcpuminerinfo a few
seconds later and check the pool status field — a refused address or an unreachable pool is
reported there, and nowhere else.
Two things worth knowing. The address is where the pool credits you — no wallet is
opened and no private key is involved on that machine. It must be a standard
pc1q… address; taproot pc1p… addresses pass the node's own check
and are then refused by the pool. And unlike solo mining, your node does not need to be
synced first, because the pool supplies the block being worked on — verified by mining
from a node at height 0 with no peers. Solo mining on an unsynced node is worse than slow:
it builds on a chain your node has not verified, so anything it finds is thrown away.
How it pays
- The pool never holds your coins. You are paid as an output of the block you helped find — the chain pays you directly. There is no pool wallet, no private key on the server, no withdrawal to request and no balance an operator could walk away with.
- Every block, automatically. No withdrawal step, because there is nothing to withdraw from. There is one threshold: a payout below the network's dust limit of 0.00000294 PCN would make the block unrelayable, so a miner under it is skipped for that block and paid by a later one.
- PPLNS — a block pays the most recent window of work, weighted by how hard each share was rather than how many you sent. Timing your arrival or departure gains nothing, and your shares keep earning after you stop, until they age out of the window.
- 2% fee, taken off the block reward before anything is split — never off coins already paid to you.
- Whole satoshis only. Every split is integer arithmetic and every block reconciles exactly: payouts plus fee plus rounding equals the reward, to the satoshi. Paying one satoshi too much would make the block invalid.
The wait nobody warns you about
A freshly mined block’s reward cannot be spent by anyone — pool or solo miner — until it is 100 blocks deep — roughly 15–17 hours at the pace the chain actually runs. Your coins are visible on the chain immediately and simply cannot move until then. That is a consensus rule, not a delay the pool invents. And if that block is later displaced from the chain — which does happen on a young network — the coins it paid never existed and they disappear. The work was real; the block was not. A pool that hid either of these would just be lying to you.
On the dust threshold above: when a miner is skipped, the amount is redistributed to the other miners rather than kept by the pool, and their shares stay in the window. You would need a share of well under a millionth of a block to reach it at all.
Mine PCoin on your phone. Spend it on four real services.
PCN is not a coin waiting for somewhere to be useful. Four live products accept it today, each with its own deposit address, and each crediting your balance automatically once the payment has six confirmations. The same phone that runs the miner can pay for what it uses.
AI Control
A Claude-powered agent that operates your Windows PCs and
Android phones through ordinary conversation.
aicontrol.pc.am
3D Models
Ready-to-use 3D models, generated on demand and downloadable
in the usual formats.
3dmodels.pc.am
Checker
Gift-card balance checking, in bulk, through a bot and a web
dashboard.
checker.pc.am
Website Builder
Describe a site in a Telegram chat and it builds, hosts and
edits it for you.
@MyWebsiteBuilderBot
Would rather not mine? You can buy PCN with ordinary crypto at market.pc.am. It is sold from a fixed ladder of 100,000 coins that gets dearer as it empties, so the price rises with demand rather than being set by anyone. There is currently nowhere to sell PCN back — buy what you intend to spend.
Point the miner at your deposit address
Put your AI Control deposit address in the miner's Forward setting. Mined PCN then arrives on its own — no manual sending, no exchange, no intermediate step.
It never touches your keys
AI Control never asks for your PCoin keys and never holds them. The deposit address is constructed so their server can receive to it and cannot spend from it. That is a property of the address itself, not a promise in a terms page.
A rate, not a market
All four services credit at the same published rate, taken from price.pc.am at the moment your deposit confirms — so none of them can quote you one number and pay another. The rate follows what PCN currently costs on the market ladder and is deliberately slow-moving. It is not a market price — PCN is not traded on any exchange, so no market price exists. Check the live figure before you send.
Two things to know before you send. It is one-way: PCN converts to AI Control balance and cannot be converted back or withdrawn. And confirmations are slow — PCoin targets a block every ten minutes, so 6 confirmations is about an hour. Deposits are recorded the moment they confirm; the balance follows.
This is also the honest answer to “where can I actually use PCN?” — one place, run by the same people who build PCoin, at a rate they set. It is a real use, not a market. Anything that calls it a price is overselling it.
The numbers that define PCoin
Everything below is consensus, fixed in code, and auditable in the public repository.
| Ticker | PCN |
|---|---|
| Max supply | 21,000,000 PCN — hard cap, identical to Bitcoin |
| Block subsidy | 50 PCN, halving every 210,000 blocks |
| Block time | 10 minutes (target). Difficulty retargets every block using LWMA from height 2800; before that it used Bitcoin's 2016-block retarget (actual spacing today runs well above target while hashrate is small — see the explorer for live blocks) |
| Proof of work | RandomX, fixed key PCoin/RandomX/v1, light-mode (256 MB) verification. Block IDs remain double-SHA256. |
| Base | Fork of Bitcoin Core v29.4 — independent network, own genesis, own magic |
| P2P / RPC ports | 9444 / 9443 (mainnet) |
| Network magic | cf a2 d1 b8 |
| Addresses | Legacy start with P (base58 prefix 55); native segwit pc1... |
| Genesis block ID | a95d51f0cbf25cad10c35961c6189356525d079835f02e83e2395f382fbe264a |
| Genesis time | 1785600628 — timestamp string: “PCoin 01/Aug/2026 an independent chain is born” |
| Launch difficulty | nBits 0x1f0fffff — about 4,096 expected hashes per block at launch (a phone can bootstrap the chain) |
| Config / data | pcoin.conf · ~/.pcoin (Linux) · %LOCALAPPDATA%\PCoin (Windows) |
Get PCoin
Each download points at the release that built it, so a link never quietly turns into a different file — and each part ships on its own schedule, so the wallet can update without the miner moving. Mining is off by default everywhere: a node that mines before it has synced is building on a chain it has not checked.
Windows
Node, CLI and tray app in one archive. Unzip and run, or use the one command below.
Download (.zip) or install with one commandLinux
Debian and Ubuntu. Installs pcoind and pcoin-cli with a systemd unit.
Package (.deb) or portable .tar.gzAndroid — wallet
Balance, send, receive by QR, history. Carries a full node; no mining.
Wallet (.apk) read this firstAndroid is different, and this one can cost you coins. The APK holds its wallet in app-private storage, so uninstalling the app destroys that wallet. Write your twelve-word recovery phrase down before you remove or replace it. Android also refuses to install over an app signed with a different key, so if you are running an earlier build from source you must uninstall first — with the same consequence.
Check what you downloaded. Every file's SHA-256 is published at pc.am/dl/SHA256SUMS.txt and alongside the release. They prove the download is intact; they are not signatures, and the builds are not reproducible yet.
Accept PCN in your own product.
There is no gateway to sign up with, no merchant account and no fee. You watch the chain for payments to addresses you derive yourself, and you keep your own keys. Four production systems run on exactly this — the guide below is the one they were built from, including the mistakes they made first.
The three endpoints you need
All three are public, unauthenticated and free. No key to request, no quota to negotiate.
- Payments — explorer.pc.am tells you what an address has received, and at what height.
- A second opinion — explorer2.pc.am is a separate node, so you can confirm a payment against two independent sources before you credit anyone.
- Pricing — price.pc.am returns serviceRate, the USD value of one PCN. Read it at the moment you credit; never hardcode it.
What a payment check looks like
# has this address been paid?
curl -s https://explorer.pc.am/api/address/pc1q…/summary
# what is a PCN worth right now?
curl -s https://price.pc.am # -> {"serviceRate":0.015, …}
Credit after 6 confirmations, and key your ledger on (txid, address) — not on (txid, vout). That one detail was shipped wrong by every integration before it was caught, and it silently loses a customer’s deposit rather than erroring. The guide explains why.
It covers deriving addresses from an xpub without putting a private key on your web server, the confirmation gates, reorg handling, refunds, and a go-live checklist.
One command. Then watch it mine.
There is no mining software to find, configure or trust — the miner is inside the node, and the node is what you just installed. Point it at an address and it runs.
Get an address
Install the wallet app and write down the twelve words it gives you. That address is where your mining pays, and those words are the only way back to it.
Install
One command for Windows, one for Debian/Ubuntu, an APK for Android. Each verifies its own download before it runs — full instructions per platform.
Paste the address in
Setup checks it against the node, so a typo is caught before it costs you a block rather than after.
Wait for sync, then mine
Mining starts by itself once the node is caught up. Starting sooner would build on blocks it has not checked.
# One command. Downloads the archive, checks it against the published # SHA-256, installs the node and miner, and puts a shortcut on your desktop. # -Threads is how many cores mine; 0 installs without mining. & ([scriptblock]::Create((irm https://pc.am/dl/install.ps1))) -Threads 4 PCoin 1.2.6 installer sha256 ok tray app present desktop shortcut created configured to mine with 4 cores # Prefer to do it by hand? Download the .zip above, unzip it anywhere and # run PCoinTray.exe. Same files, same result.
# On Debian or Ubuntu, this is the whole thing. # It checks the download against the published SHA-256, installs the # node, then asks where to pay your block rewards. curl -fsSL https://pc.am/dl/install.sh | sudo sh checksum verified installed PCoin miner setup ------------------------------------------------------------ + node running, at height 3591 Where should block rewards be paid? Payout address: pc1q… + address checked by the node and valid Mining threads [3]: Run at low priority so other software always wins? [Y/n]: ------------------------------------------------------------ + payout address : pc1q… + mining threads : 3 of 4 + priority : background (nice 15, idle IO) ------------------------------------------------------------ Mining. # Watch it work. Press b for your balance, q to quit. # A real session from 15 Aug 2026 — your share depends on the network # size on the day, which only ever grows. Check pool.pc.am for today's. pcoin-mine PCoin miner Status * mining with 3 of 4 cores Hashrate 128 H/s of 53.5 kH/s on the whole network -- 0.24% A block every 2d 17h estimate, and luck swings it wildly Blocks found 0 Chain 3591 up to date, 8 peers Paying to pc1q… # Rewards go straight to the address you gave — this machine never # holds a key, so there is nothing on it worth stealing. Point as # many machines at one address as you like. # Change your mind later, or stop mining without stopping the node: sudo pcoin-setup sudo systemctl stop pcoin-miner # Prefer no packages? Take the portable archive instead: # .../releases/download/v1.3.0/pcoin-linux-x86_64-miner.tar.gz # then run ./bitcoind -daemon from inside it.
Near-term goals
No dates promised, no tokens sold. Shipped items say so; everything else is still to do, and nothing here is described as finished before it is.
-
Android node + miner app Shipped
An app that runs a full node and mines on your phone's CPU. The clearest proof of the mission: money creation from the device in your pocket. Built from the same source as the wallet below.
-
Android wallet app Shipped
A wallet-only build with no miner in it: balance, send, receive with a QR code, and history. It carries a full node rather than trusting a server, which the whole chain being about 20 MB makes practical. A twelve-word recovery phrase restores it on any device.
-
Block explorer and public API Shipped
Live at explorer.pc.am: blocks, transactions, addresses and a rich list, plus a read-only JSON API at /api for wallets and, eventually, exchange integrations.
-
PCN accepted by four live services Shipped
Not a pilot and not a promise: AI Control, 3dmodels.pc.am, checker.pc.am and @MyWebsiteBuilderBot all take PCN today. Each issues you an address only your account is credited for, waits six confirmations, and converts at the rate published by price.pc.am. Every deposit is checked against two independent block explorers before any balance moves, and a deposit that cannot be corroborated is held rather than credited.
-
Second block explorer Shipped
A second indexer on a different machine, reading from a different node, exists so no single explorer decides whether your money arrived. The payment services compare the two and refuse to credit when they disagree.
-
100 independent nodes In progress
Get one hundred people running always-on nodes in different places. Decentralized block production and history is the foundation for everything else. Today the number is far smaller than that, and most of the hashrate is the founder's own machines.
-
Browser-based wallet Planned
Not built yet. The intent is send and receive without installing anything, for people who will never touch a command line. Until it exists, the Android wallet and the desktop node are the only wallets there are.
-
Tipping and person-to-person payments Planned
Paying services with PCN now works — see the four above. What does not exist yet is paying people: tipping a creator, settling a small debt, sending value to someone who is not a merchant. That needs a wallet ordinary people will actually install, which is why the browser wallet sits above this one.
Read this before you mine
A fair coin deserves fair disclosure. Here is everything we'd want to know in your place.
Young, experimental chain
PCoin launched in August 2026. It is an experiment in fair money creation — not an investment. It has no price, and nothing here is financial advice. Treat PCN as something you mine and learn with, not something you buy.
No premine — but the founder holds most of the coins today
There was no premine, no allocation and no sale: every PCN in existence was mined. But almost all of the mining so far has been done by the founder's own machines, so the founder still holds roughly three quarters of everything mined — about 130,100 of ~174,600 PCN, spread across three addresses rather than one; the largest single address is 39.6%. You do not have to take that on trust: it is the top entry in the public rich list, and you can check it yourself. That share falls as other people mine, and that is the entire point of publishing it.
Security grows with you
A proof-of-work chain is only as strong as its honest hashrate. Today that hashrate is small, so the network is not yet resistant to well-resourced attackers. Every new miner and node makes it stronger. That is exactly why participation matters.
Open source, auditable
The full source is public on GitHub under the MIT license, based on Bitcoin Core. Don't trust our claims — read the diff.