Download PCoin
One command per platform. Every installer checks the download against a published SHA-256 before it runs, and refuses rather than half-installing. PCoin mines on ordinary CPUs — there is no GPU or ASIC to buy.
Paste one line into PowerShell
Press Win, type PowerShell, press Enter to open it, then paste this line and press Enter again:
irm https://pc.am/dl/install.ps1 | iex
That single line does everything — it downloads the miner, checks the file is genuine, installs the node and miner, and starts mining. When a blue User Account Control box appears, click Yes so it can finish setting up. (Click No if you prefer — it still installs and mines, just without a couple of extras.)
If Windows shows a blue “protected your PC” box
Click More info, then Run anyway.
It is mining — open the tray to see it
A small PCoin icon appears down by the clock (click the ∧ arrow if you don’t see it). Click it and choose Open for your live hash rate, the block height, and the address your rewards are paid to. Three things worth doing:
- Solo or pool? The window has a Mining mode panel that tells you which fits your machine: Pool pays a small, steady amount; Solo pays a whole block when your PC finds one. Smaller miners usually want pool. Pick one and click Apply — the app only suggests, it never switches on its own. Once you choose Pool, the window shows a live count of the shares the pool has accepted — that climbing number is your proof it’s working, even while your balance here stays at zero.
- Back up your recovery phrase. Click Recovery phrase and write the twelve words on paper. If Windows is ever reinstalled, those words are the only way to recover your coins.
- Let it sync first. Mining before the chain has finished downloading is wasted work, so the miner waits. The chain is small — it takes only a few minutes; watch your height reach the explorer’s.
Prefer to do it by hand?
The archive is a plain zip — no installer, nothing written to the registry.
Unzip it anywhere and run PCoinTray.exe.
| File | What it contains |
|---|---|
| pcoin-win64-miner.zip | Node, CLI and the tray miner |
| pcoin-win64-wallet.zip | The wallet: node, CLI and PCoinWallet.exe — no mining |
# check it before you run it
Get-FileHash .\pcoin-win64-miner.zip -Algorithm SHA256
Compare that against pc.am/dl/SHA256SUMS.txt.
Inside are bitcoind.exe, bitcoin-cli.exe and
PCoinTray.exe. The tray app is the only one you need to launch.
Just a wallet, no mining
PCoin Wallet is a separate program: create or restore your twelve words, receive to a
QR code, send with the real fee shown before anything goes out, scroll your history, keep an
address book. It runs its own node in its own folder (C:\PCoinWallet) and never
mines, so it can live on a PC that also runs the miner. The same twelve words open the wallet
in the Android app.
irm https://pc.am/dl/install-wallet.ps1 | iex
That downloads pcoin-win64-wallet.zip, checks its SHA-256, installs it, puts
PCoin Wallet on the desktop and in Settings → Apps, and opens it. Removing it
later is the ordinary Settings → Apps → Uninstall; the uninstaller copies your
wallet files to your user folder before it deletes anything. Prefer to unzip by hand?
Run PCoinWallet.exe from the archive above — it needs nothing else.
Removing PCoin
Versions 1.3.16 to 1.4.1 — the pinned download between 03:33 and 08:49 UTC that day — shipped an uninstaller that looked for the node wallet in two places it is not on a fresh install. It rescued only the settings file, printed WALLET SAVED TO … and then removed the wallet anyway. If you never wrote your twelve-word recovery phrase down, that file was the only copy of your coins. 1.4.2 fixes it.
Settings > Apps runs the copy on your own machine, not this site’s, so the fix does not reach you by itself. Run either of these first:
irm https://pc.am/dl/install.ps1 | iex — upgrades you to 1.4.2, or
irm https://pc.am/dl/uninstall.ps1 | iex — removes PCoin with the fixed uninstaller.
Any of these three — they all run the same uninstaller:
- Settings > Apps > Installed apps > PCoin Miner > Uninstall
- the tray icon’s right-click menu, Uninstall PCoin…
uninstall.ps1, which is in the install folder and in the zip
It does not delete your wallet — true of 1.4.2 and later, and of
everything before 1.3.16 (see the warning above). Your recovery phrase and wallet file are
copied into a dated folder in your user profile before anything is
removed, and the uninstaller prints the path. If that copy fails it stops and
changes nothing, because an uninstall you can retry is better than coins
nobody can reach. The chain data goes (it re-downloads in minutes);
-KeepData keeps it.
If the install folder is already damaged, the uninstaller is also served on its own:
irm https://pc.am/dl/uninstall.ps1 | iex
-datadir=C:\PCoin\data) to keep the two apart. The installer does
this for you.
One command
Verifies the download against the published SHA-256, installs the node, then runs a short setup wizard.
curl -fsSL https://pc.am/dl/install.sh | sudo sh
Answer three questions
Where block rewards should be paid, how many threads to mine with, and a CPU ceiling. The address is validated by a running node rather than a regex, so a typo is caught before it can cost you a block reward.
CPUQuota, which is a hard cap rather than a
priority hint. Left uncapped the miner sits at a flat 100% of a core on an idle
box — exactly the sustained load that earns a fair-use warning on a
shared-vCPU plan. Our own Linux miners run one thread each.
Watch it work
# live view: hashrate, share of network, block ETA # press b to scan the chain for your payout address, q to quit pcoin-mine
Day to day:
sudo systemctl status pcoin-miner # is it mining? sudo systemctl stop pcoin-miner # stop mining, node keeps running sudo pcoin-setup # change address, threads or CPU cap journalctl -u pcoin-miner -n 40 # why it is or is not mining
Packages, if you would rather not pipe to a shell
| File | What it is |
|---|---|
| pcoin-linux-amd64-miner.deb | Debian/Ubuntu package — same contents the one-liner installs |
| pcoin-linux-x86_64-miner.tar.gz | Plain binaries, any distribution |
curl -fsSLO https://github.com/pars5555/pcoin/releases/download/v1.4.4/pcoin-linux-amd64-miner.deb curl -fsSL https://pc.am/dl/SHA256SUMS.txt -o SHA256SUMS.txt sha256sum --ignore-missing -c SHA256SUMS.txt sudo apt install ./pcoin-linux-amd64-miner.deb
--ignore-missing is not optional.
The list covers every file in the release and you downloaded one of them. Without
that flag sha256sum reports failures for files you never asked for.
Two apps from one codebase. Both carry a full PCoin node and a wallet; the difference is whether mining is compiled in at all. Neither app holds wPCN, the wrapped form of PCN on BNB Smart Chain — that lives in a BSC wallet that can add a custom BEP-20 token (MetaMask works) and trades on PancakeSwap. wrapdesk.pc.am/redeem turns wPCN back into PCN you can receive in these apps, and wrapdesk.pc.am goes the other way. To get PCN without mining, see market.pc.am.
| File | What it is |
|---|---|
| pcoin-android-miner.apk | Node, wallet and mining |
| pcoin-1.3.15-android-miner-legacy.apk | The same miner for phones whose installed app shows package org.pcoin.miner (Settings → Apps → PCoin Miner → app details). It upgrades in place; the file above would install as a second app, and uninstalling the old one destroys its wallet |
| Google Play — PCoin Wallet | Node and wallet, no mining. The easiest route: Play keeps it updated · privacy policy |
| pcoin-android-wallet.apk | The same wallet as a direct download. Signed with our key, not Google's, so the two cannot upgrade each other — pick one and stay on it |
Install the APK
The wallet is on Google Play — install it from there and this step does not apply. For the miner, or the wallet as a direct .apk, download it on the phone, tap it, and allow installation from your browser when prompted; Android asks once.
Write the recovery phrase on paper
On first run the app shows twelve words. They are the only way back to your coins if the phone is lost or wiped.
Switching between the Play version and the .apk is exactly that case. Google signs store builds with its own key, so neither can upgrade the other: Android makes you uninstall first, and the wallet and your saved addresses go with it. Export your address book too — it is wiped by the same uninstall.
Expect modest hashrate, and some heat
A phone does real work but far less than a desktop, and sustained mining warms the battery. The miner has a thermal limit and a dead-man’s switch: if the OS kills the app, mining stops rather than being left running unsupervised.
The published builds are not reproducible yet — each was produced once, on one machine. If you want a guarantee stronger than a checksum served from the same place as the download, build it yourself.
sudo apt-get install build-essential cmake pkgconf python3 \
libevent-dev libboost-dev libsqlite3-dev
git clone https://github.com/pars5555/pcoin.git
cd pcoin
cmake -B build -DBUILD_GUI=OFF -DENABLE_WALLET=ON -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
cmake --build build -j "$(nproc)"
./build/bin/bitcoind --version
Binaries land in build/bin/. Run the consensus tests with
./build/bin/test_bitcoin --run_test=pow_tests.
Verifying what you downloaded
Checksums are published in two places that would have to be compromised together to fool you: pc.am/dl/SHA256SUMS.txt and the GitHub release each file came from — the list names the release beside every entry, because the wallet and the miner ship separately and no longer come from one release. The two must agree.
Common questions
Windows says the file is dangerous. Is it a virus?
No, and two different Windows features get confused here. SmartScreen warns about any executable it has not seen widely downloaded, regardless of what is inside it — that is the blue “Windows protected your PC” box, and a paid code-signing certificate is what removes it. Defender is the antivirus, and it does not flag PCoin: every release is checked on a real machine with real-time protection on, current signatures, and a forced scan of the extracted binaries. If your antivirus does quarantine something, please tell us — a mining program is a common false-positive shape and we would rather chase it down than have you guess.
How much can I earn?
Each block pays 50 PCN and arrives roughly every ten minutes, shared among everyone mining. Your share is your hashrate over the network’s. The calculator on the front page does the arithmetic with live numbers. PCN itself is on no exchange. Its wrapped form, wPCN, trades in a small PancakeSwap pool that is steered to the rate posted at price.pc.am — the same rate the services that accept PCN use — so read that page, not the pool, for a price. Either way, treat this as a young project, not an income.
Do I need to forward a port?
No. The node makes outbound connections and finds peers by itself. Forwarding port 9444 lets others connect to you and helps the network, but nothing about mining requires it.
Can I mine with a GPU or an ASIC?
No, and that is the point. PCoin uses RandomX, which runs well on ordinary CPUs
and badly on specialised hardware, so a laptop is a legitimate participant.
Every SHA-256 miner is useless against this chain, and so is stock xmrig. If you
already run a rig, SRBMiner-Multi
3.5.6 or newer mines PCN natively (algorithm randompcn) against
the pool — CPU only, and with its own 0.85% developer fee.
Where do my coins actually go?
To an address you control. On Windows and Android the app holds a wallet and can forward to any address you set. On Linux the miner pays a bare address you supply, so the machine holds no key at all — which is what you want on a rented server.
I run a shop or a service. Can I accept PCN?
Yes — the integration guide is at docs.pc.am. It covers deposit addresses, confirmations, reorg handling and custody, with the mistakes that have already cost this project money written down so nobody repeats them.