PCoin

Get a PCoin wallet

Your coins live on the chain, not in the app. A wallet holds the key that proves they are yours — which is why the twelve words it gives you matter more than the software does. Any PCoin wallet can restore any other's words.

PCoin wallet on Android, synced and showing a balance
The wallet on Android, caught up with the chain. The receive address and its QR are blurred here on purpose — this is a throwaway wallet made for the screenshot.

The easiest way to hold PCN. It runs a real PCoin node on the phone, so it checks the chain itself rather than trusting a server. First sync took about seven minutes on a moto g play.

Get it on Google Play Download the APK

Pick one and stay with it. Google Play re-signs the app with its own key, so the Play version and the APK from this site have different signatures. Android refuses to install one over the other — moving in either direction forces an uninstall, and uninstalling erases the app's private storage, taking the wallet and the address book with it.

This has already cost somebody a ten-entry address book. Before switching: write your twelve words on paper and export your address book. An ordinary in-place update is safe; it is only the switch between sources that is not.

First run

  • The app creates a wallet and shows you twelve words. Write them down, on paper, before doing anything else.
  • It then syncs the chain. This takes a few minutes the first time.
  • Your receiving address starts pc1. Share it freely — it reveals nothing.

A desktop wallet with its own node. It is a separate program from the Windows miner and the two run side by side without interfering — different folder, different data directory, different RPC port. The wallet never mines.

Install

In PowerShell:

irm https://pc.am/dl/install-wallet.ps1 | iex

It installs into C:\PCoinWallet and adds an entry under Settings → Apps, so it uninstalls like any other program. Uninstalling rescues your wallet files before removing anything.

Windows SmartScreen will warn about it, because the binaries are not code-signed. Choose More info → Run anyway.

What it does

  • Send and receive, with an address book and payment URIs.
  • Searchable history.
  • Twelve-word backup, held encrypted with Windows DPAPI so only your account can read it.

For people who would rather drive it themselves. The node ships a wallet; bitcoin-cli is the interface. Binaries are in the releases, or build from source.

Two settings every sending wallet needs. Without them the wallet appears to work and then fails the first time you try to spend: 
fallbackfee=0.00001
changetype=bech32
PCoin has no fee history, so without fallbackfee every send fails with “Fee estimation failed”. And a phrase-backed wallet holds only wpkh descriptors, so without changetype=bech32 a send to a taproot pc1p… address fails while working out the change.

The usual commands

bitcoin-cli -datadir=/var/lib/pcoin getnewaddress
bitcoin-cli -datadir=/var/lib/pcoin getbalances
bitcoin-cli -datadir=/var/lib/pcoin sendtoaddress pc1... 1.0

Note the config file is pcoin.conf, not bitcoin.conf. A node handed the wrong filename ignores every setting in it without a word of complaint — it is the most common mistake on this chain.

Your twelve words are the wallet

Every PCoin wallet is built from a twelve-word BIP39 recovery phrase. Anyone with those words has your coins; anyone without them cannot help you, including us. There is no reset, no support line and no back door.

  • Write them on paper. Two copies, two places.
  • Never photograph them, never type them into anything that is not a PCoin wallet, never put them in a note-taking app or a password manager you do not control.
  • Nobody legitimate will ever ask for them. Anyone who does is stealing from you.

Restoring somewhere else

Enter the twelve words into any PCoin wallet and it rebuilds the same addresses. If you are restoring into other software, the derivation path is:

m / 84' / 9444' / 0' / 0 / 0        native SegWit, addresses start pc1q

The 9444' matters. PCoin kept Bitcoin's extended-key version bytes, so that number is the only thing keeping the two chains' keys apart — change it and you will derive Bitcoin addresses from your PCoin phrase.

A backup is not a backup until you have restored it. Before you rely on it, restore the words into a second wallet and check the first address matches. Note that asking a restored wallet for a “new address” is not a valid check — a restore correctly skips past every address that has already been used.

What destroys a wallet

  • Uninstalling the Android app — it erases app-private storage.
  • Switching between the Play version and a sideloaded APK, which forces that uninstall.
  • Losing the phone or the disk without having written the words down.

Getting some PCN

A wallet starts empty. Three ways to fill it:

Check any address and its balance on explorer.pc.am. You do not need a wallet open, and you do not need to tell anyone anything to look.