News & Releases

The wallet is on Google Play, and switching to it erases the old one

PCoin Wallet is published on Google Play — play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=am.pc.pcoinwallet, available in 177 countries. It is the same app we have shipped as an .apk: a full node on the phone, twelve words, receive by QR, send with a Normal / Fast / Very fast fee choice and the real fee shown before you commit, full history, and a private address book you can export to a file and import back. Play keeps it updated, which the direct download never did.

If you already run the .apk, read this before you install from Play. Google signs store builds with its own key, and Android refuses to install an app over one signed by a different key. So Play cannot upgrade the .apk and the .apk cannot upgrade Play: the switch requires an uninstall, and an uninstall erases app-private storage — your wallet and your saved addresses with it. There is no migration and no way around it; the two builds are, to Android, unrelated apps.

Before you switch: write your twelve words on paper and check them, and open the address book and use Export to a file. Then install from Play, restore the twelve words, and use Import from a file to get the names back. Pick one of the two routes afterwards and stay on it.

We are writing this from experience rather than theory: the first person to make the switch was us, and the address book went with it. The coins were never at risk — the phrase was on paper — but a list of ten saved payees vanished with no warning shown anywhere, which is the sort of thing you only find out by doing it.

A separate wallet app for Windows, and an uninstaller bug that deleted wallets

PCoin Wallet is now its own Windows application. It runs its own node and never mines, so it can sit alongside the miner on the same PC without either noticing the other. Twelve words, receive by QR, send with the real fee shown before you commit, history, and an address book. Install it with irm https://pc.am/dl/install-wallet.ps1 | iex; remove it from Settings > Apps, which copies the wallet files out before deleting anything.

And the part we would rather not be writing. For about five hours on 3 September — between 03:33 and 08:49 UTC — the pinned Windows miner download was a version whose uninstaller was broken. Releases 1.3.16 through 1.4.1 looked for the node wallet in two places it is not on a fresh install, rescued only the settings file, printed WALLET SAVED TO … and then removed the wallet anyway. If you had never written your twelve-word recovery phrase down, that file was the only copy of your coins.

1.4.2 fixes it, but installing the fix is not enough on its own. Windows runs the uninstaller stored on your own machine, so Settings > Apps on an affected install still executes the broken copy. If you installed the Windows miner that day, run one of these before you uninstall anything:

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 using the fixed uninstaller.

We found this by auditing our own release notes against what the site promised: two pages said, without qualification, that uninstalling never deletes your wallet. Both now say when that is true and when it was not. No user reported this — which is the uncomfortable part, because a wallet deleted quietly does not generate a complaint.

Komodo accepted PCN, and SRBMiner-Multi mines it out of the box

The Komodo DeFi Framework listing is no longer a request. Pull request #1964 was merged on 31 August after the maintainer ran a swap of their own against our chain — the second completed PCN atomic swap, and the first not between two wallets we control. PCN is now in the coins list (PCN, legacy P… addresses, 2 confirmations, both ElectrumX servers). Neither swap is a price; nothing here will ever cite one as such.

If you already run a mining rig, you no longer need our node to mine PCN. SRBMiner-Multi added a native randompcn algorithm in version 3.5.6 on 17 August, and we verified it against pool.pc.am on 2 September: it connects, receives work and has shares accepted. --algorithm randompcn --pool pool.pc.am:3333 --wallet <pc1q…>, CPU only, with SRBMiner's own 0.85% developer fee on top of the pool's 2%. The rx/pcoin pull request to xmrigCC remains open and unmerged. Our own miner stays built into the node and stays the path we support first.

Also noticed, rather than arranged by us: LiveCoinWatch lists PCN — with no price. PCN itself is on no exchange, and wPCN's PancakeSwap pool is one we steer to price.pc.am rather than a price discovered by strangers, so we do not offer it as one. CoinCodex has said it will not list a coin that is on no exchange, and that remains the honest state of things.

PCN can now be traded, wrapped and redeemed

wPCN is PCoin wrapped as a BEP-20 on BNB Smart Chain, trading against USDT on PancakeSwap. It exists so someone with a wallet and USDT can get PCN exposure without mining first or finding a counterparty. 50,000 supply, fixed forever — the contract has no owner and no mint function.

Both directions work. wrapdesk.pc.am turns PCN into wPCN: you are given a deposit address that is yours alone, and after 100 confirmations a person sends your wPCN. Going back is handled by the contract itself — redeem() burns your wPCN and the PCN is sent to the PCoin address you name; wrapdesk.pc.am/redeem lets the wallet on your phone call it without typing satoshi amounts into BscScan.

Read the limits before using it: 250 PCN per person, 1,500 wPCN in total while the desk is new, a 5% fee, and about 17 hours of confirmations (100 blocks). Both directions are manual — a person releases the funds, so allow hours rather than minutes. The pool is small — a trade of a few tens of dollars moves its price about 10% — the liquidity is not locked, and we trade that pool ourselves to hold it near the rate posted at price.pc.am. Backing is 1:1 and you can check it yourself on the proof page.

Update, 2 September. Both doors have now been used end to end. The first redemption completed today — 1 wPCN burned on BNB Smart Chain, 1 PCN paid and confirmed in PCoin block 6172 — and the listing and the desk were announced on @PCoinPCN. wPCN needs a BNB Smart Chain wallet that lets you add a custom BEP-20 token (MetaMask works; Exodus currently hides the token). Redeem through wrapdesk.pc.am/redeem from inside your wallet's browser — BscScan's own “Write Contract” form fails from MetaMask on Android. A wrap in progress is at /track.

Android miner: a fresh install could not find a peer, and a stuck pool job went unnoticed

v1.3.14. The app shipped only two bootstrap peers, and they were the same machine. When that node's inbound slots were full a new phone connected, was greeted, and was dropped seconds later — every time — so the miner correctly refused to start and the screen said “waiting to sync” with no error anywhere. The app now lists the DNS seed plus four separate machines, and that node's connection limit was raised.

v1.3.15. A pool client could latch onto a job the pool had already forgotten and mine for an hour earning nothing, while every rejected share said stale. A run of consecutive rejections now forces a reconnect, which issues fresh work. The fix lives in the bundled node, so it needed a rebuilt native binary to reach a phone.

v1.3.13. The launcher icon carries the same inset as the wallet's coin. All three install in place over the previous version; phones still on the original app id (org.pcoin.miner) need the -legacy APK from the download page. The wallet APK is unchanged at v1.2.8.

Two ElectrumX servers, and a Komodo listing filed

PCoin now runs two ElectrumX servers — electrum1.pc.am and electrum2.pc.am, SSL on 50002, WSS on 50004, TCP on 50001. They sit with separate providers in separate countries, each backed by its own full node with a real certificate, and are checked from outside every ten minutes. This is the wallet infrastructure light clients need in order to exist at all.

Worth noting for anyone integrating a Bitcoin fork: no ElectrumX patch was required. PCoin replaced only the proof-of-work check with RandomX, so block IDs are still double-SHA256 and headers are still a fixed 80 bytes — and ElectrumX never validates proof-of-work. A stock Bitcoin-derived coin class works unmodified.

On the back of that, PCN has been submitted to the Komodo DeFi Framework for non-custodial atomic swaps, with a completed swap behind it: 100 PCN traded for DOGE, settled on both chains. Submitted is not accepted — it is a request and it can be refused. The status lives on that pull request, not on this page.

The Windows miner tunes itself

“All cores” was a trap. RandomX fast mode does not scale with core count: once the 2 MiB per-worker scratchpads stop fitting in L3, extra threads evict each other and the total hash rate falls. Measured on a 12-core i9-10920X, eight threads beat twenty-four. The miner now measures instead of guessing, and picks its own thread count.

Also in this run: optional large pages, a single-instance installer, an auto-miner you can start with one command, a clearer choice between pool and solo mining with advice on which suits your machine, and a fix for fast mode over-threading on hyperthreaded CPUs.

And a display fix that answered the most common question we got: pool miners kept asking “it says 720 H/s but 0 PCN — is it working?” It was. A pool miner finds no blocks and its local balance stays zero by design; the pool finds the blocks and pays your address on its own schedule. The window now shows your shares and the pool connection, so working looks like working.

Windows: the app looks and behaves like an app

An app icon, one obvious executable to run rather than a folder of candidates, and a Start mining control that actually reads as a button. Two follow-up releases fixed a button change that had not taken effect and a fast-mode setting that stopped the miner instead of speeding it up.

Linux packaging declares the libraries it actually links

The .deb declared almost none of its real dependencies, so it installed cleanly and then failed to start — on Debian 13 the postinst died because adduser no longer ships, and on Ubuntu 24.04 it reported success and then could not find libsqlite3. Both are invisible on a machine that already has the software's dependencies, which is every developer's machine.

The build now maps every linked library to a package and fails the build when one is not declared, rather than printing a list nobody compares. Same binaries as v1.3.0, metadata only, so the fix could not smuggle a behaviour change in with it.

Android: refuse to mine with no peers

A node with no peers cannot know the current tip, so anything it mines is built on a chain nobody else is extending — work that is thrown away the moment it reconnects. The app now declines to start rather than burning your battery on blocks that cannot count.

Windows and Linux update

A desktop release: the node, CLI and tray miner. The Android apps are unchanged and still come from their own releases — every download link here is pinned to the release that built it, so the parts move independently.

Android wallet update

A wallet-only release. The miner, Windows and Linux downloads are unchanged and still served from v1.2.6 — every download link on this site is pinned to the release tag that built it, so a single-component release like this one cannot break the others.

Release assets now name their role

Artifacts became pcoin-<platform>-<role>.<ext> — for example pcoin-win64-miner.zip and pcoin-android-wallet.apk. The previous names are still published as byte-identical aliases so that saved copies of the install scripts keep working.

The Windows zip now also contains the tray miner. Earlier zips held only the node and the CLI, which produced an install that reported success and left a desktop shortcut pointing at a file that had never been installed.

Debian packaging fixed

The .deb had declared only libc6 as a dependency. The binaries link libevent dynamically, so on distributions shipping only libevent_core the node installed cleanly and then failed at every start. All three libevent modules are now declared, with alternatives for the 64-bit time_t rename.

Windows installer withdrawn

The Inno Setup installer was being quarantined by a Microsoft Defender machine-learning heuristic. It was a reputation false positive on the installer stub rather than anything in the code, and it aged out on its own, but the installer was dropped rather than shipped under a warning. Windows is distributed as a portable zip.

Note that all binaries are unsigned, so SmartScreen will warn on first run. That is a separate mechanism from Defender and only a code-signing certificate removes it.

Miner and wallet split into two Android apps

One source tree, two products: a miner and a wallet-only build with mining compiled out, for people who want to hold and send PCN without running a miner.

CPU miner concurrency fix

Two tray applications on one machine could issue startmining simultaneously and terminate the process. The miner lifecycle is now serialised under a single mutex.

Android, and the LWMA code ships

First Android build, and the release that carried the LWMA implementation ahead of its activation at height 2800 a week later. Shipping consensus code before the height it activates is what allowed the fork to land without a split.

First patch release

Windows and Android builds, one day after launch.