A CPU can still mine a coin.

Bincoin’s proof of work is RandomX v2, unmodified upstream, run on ordinary consumer CPUs. There is no ASIC-favoring hash function and no GPU advantage by design.

Two first-party binaries make up the stack, both built from the same workspace as the node — see Source Code.

• bincoin-miner — the CPU miner. Runs the RandomX v2 hash loop, drives a block template, submits solved blocks.
• p2poold — the sharechain daemon (crate bincoin-p2pool). A first-party P2Pool-style implementation: miners gossip “shares,” a deterministic PPLNS engine apportions each block’s reward, paid straight out of the coinbase to each miner’s own wallet.

Solo mines directly against a bincoin-node you run. You get the full block reward on a solve, and you carry the full variance.

Sovereign P2Pool mines through p2poold, which pools hash rate across participants via the sharechain and apportions payouts by PPLNS — without ever taking custody of anyone’s coins or block reward.

--network selects the RandomX mode: Fast (the production dataset) for mainnet/testnet, Light for regtest. --address takes a real P2SQH payout address (bech32m, HRP bin/tbn/rbn by network) — the miner never needs, and never asks for, a wallet spend key.

Sovereign mining is a design law, not a feature — the following are anti-targets: things the project has decided never to build, on purpose.

• ◆ No mining design that requires a wallet’s private spend key inside miner software. The miner only ever holds a payout address.
• ◆ No pool design where an operator receives the block reward and pays miners out later. Payout is direct from the coinbase, every block.
• ◆ No pool design where the operator owns the block template. Miners and the sharechain drive template construction, not a central operator.

What the first day of mainnet actually looks like for one person with one ordinary machine, using nothing but the binaries above. No account, no pool sign-up, no custodian — the whole flow runs on hardware you own.

1. Build the workspace from the source archive (cargo build --release --workspace) — that yields bincoin-node, the wallet tools, and bincoin-miner in one pass.
2. Start your node. It writes a fresh RPC auth token to <data_dir>/node/.cookie on every start, then syncs the chain — on day one there is barely a chain to sync.
3. Generate a payout address with the wallet tools (bincoin-walletd / bincoin-wallet). A mainnet P2SQH address starts with bin1. The miner only ever sees this address — never a spend key.
4. Point the miner at your node: bincoin-miner solo --node-rpc <url> --address bin1... --cookie <path> --threads N. Leave a core or two for yourself.
5. Know the arithmetic going in. Blocks target one per 600 seconds, network-wide. Your expected share of them is your fraction of total network hash rate — at genesis difficulty (1, the consensus floor) with few participants that can be a lot; as CPUs join it thins out. Solo means the full 50-Bincoin block subsidy or nothing: variance is the price of no middleman.
6. When you solve one, the reward pays straight from the coinbase to your address, and consensus holds it for 100 confirmations (about 16 hours 40 minutes at target cadence) before it is spendable. If the variance is unbearable, p2poold above smooths it without taking custody.