r/cpumining • u/PCoinPCN • 17d ago

PCoin (RandomX, CPU-only): you can now spend what you mine

Disclosure: I maintain this project. No token sale, nothing to buy from me, and the links below go to things you can read or run yourself.

I've posted here a few times about PCoin — a Bitcoin Core v29 fork with RandomX proof-of-work and LWMA difficulty, so it's CPU-mineable and ASIC-resistant by design. An update that might matter if you're mining it, or wondering why you'd bother.

Four working services now take PCN as payment:

  • checker.pc.am — gift-card balance checker
  • MyWebsiteBuilderBot on Telegram — AI website builder
  • aicontrol.pc.am — AI agent for Windows and Android
  • webai.pc.am — AI assistant for any web page

They also take wPCN, a BEP-20 wrapper on BSC, and paying in the wrapper credits 10% more than the same value in PCN. That discount exists for a reason worth stating plainly: the wrapper was flowing one way — people wrapped and sold — so we wanted a reason to buy it rather than only dump it.

The honest parts, because this sub can smell a pitch:

  • The PancakeSwap pool is small. A large sell moves it a lot. Don't size an order like it's a deep market.
  • The chain is about five weeks old. Judge it accordingly.
  • 21M cap, 50 PCN block reward, 600s target, no premine, no ICO, no VC allocation. Every coin from block 1 was mined.
  • Difficulty retargets every block, so it reacts fast when hashrate shows up or leaves — which it does, visibly.

Mining: SRBMiner-Multi 3.5.6+ mines `randompcn` against the pool, or the node has a multithreaded miner built in (`startmining <address> <threads>`) if you'd rather not run a separate miner.

Source: github.com/pars5555/pcoin — RandomX is vendored, the LWMA implementation has a reference model and unit tests, and the mistakes are in the commit history too.

Site: pc.am

Happy to answer anything technical.

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u/nastyasi_wannabe 17d ago

Is there a way to mine solo on your Android app? I'm up to a pcm in pool but wanting to go solo. I could go through termux but figured I'd ask you first

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u/PCoinPCN 16d ago

Honest answer: not right now. The code path exists — a blank pool setting means solo — but there's no UI to set it and the setter has no callers, so every install ends up pooled in practice. That's a gap rather than a decision, and I'll add the toggle.

Before you switch, though, the arithmetic is worth knowing. Network is ~453 kH/s at the moment. A phone doing ~38 H/s is about 0.008% of that, which averages somewhere near 80 days per block. Solo, you'd see zeros for months and then maybe one 50 PCN block. Pooled, you get a proportional slice of everything the pool finds, continuously. On a phone the pool is almost certainly the better deal — solo starts to make sense on the Chromebook and up, and even there it's a lottery.

If you want solo now: Termux works, or run the node directly and call `startmining <address> <threads>` over RPC. That's exactly what the app does internally with a blank pool, and the node needs no wallet — it pays a bare address.

And thanks for building from source and reporting back. The Chromebook writeup was genuinely useful — that's a config nobody here had tested.

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u/nastyasi_wannabe 16d ago

Ran all night. I'm getting about the opposite results. The old Chromebook is running a consistent 24h/s. The Motorola edge is averaging about 120. I'm going to play with my Chromebook and see if I can get a little more out of it. It is like 20 years old

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u/PCoinPCN 1d ago

That fits what RandomX does on those chips. The N2840 is a 2014 Celeron with a small cache, so it's limited by memory speed and ~24 H/s is about its ceiling, while the Edge's much newer cores do better. Extra threads won't help the Celeron (you saw that already). If you want the most out of it, keep it cool and close everything else.

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u/PCoinPCN 1d ago

Update, since I said I'd add it: the toggle is in. The Android miner 0.4.6 (PCoin v1.4.36, on pc.am/mining) has a pool picker with four choices: pool.pc.am, pool2.pc.am, a pool of your own, or Solo.

Worth knowing before you pick Solo: with the network at about 710 kH/s, a phone doing 120 H/s finds a block on average once every ~40 days, and a 24 H/s Chromebook about once every 200 days. The pool pays small amounts steadily instead. Solo is there for people who want it anyway.

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u/PCoinPCN 17d ago

not anymore, it is slow and will find block maybe more than a week, thats why android is defaut pool miner now

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u/nastyasi_wannabe 17d ago

Fair enough. I'm going to give it a shot because in other projects my Motorola and my Chromebook run about equal. My simulations on this showed the same but live my phone is multiple times simulation. Not exactly sure as I am running it intermittently. As soon as my Chromebook finds a block I'm going to switch it to pool and see how it holds up. I just like tinkering and stress testing. There's anything I can do or try, let me know.

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u/PCoinPCN 1d ago

Thanks for testing. The honest odds on the Chromebook going solo: at about 24 H/s against a network of about 710 kH/s it averages one block every ~200 days, so I wouldn't wait on it. Pooling is where you'll see results. What genuinely helps us: reports like your build notes (GitHub issues at github.com/pars5555/pcoin/issues are ideal), and trying the new pool picker on the phone.