| First, the important part: I'm not selling anything. You can't buy my coin, you can't sell my coin, there is no market. This post is about the technology, not about finance. If you came here for a number that goes up, you're in the wrong place. TL;DR: I built a cryptocurrency that runs entirely in a browser tab. Open the page, you're a full node, no login or special hardware. Mining uses memory-hard Argon2id so a phone and a server farm have roughly equal odds. Bitcoin-shaped rules (21M cap, 50/block, halving), fully open source, no premine, no presale, no market. You can't buy it and I'm not selling anything if you want some mine them. It's a free experiment in how crypto actually works. https://browsercoin.org/ Okay. Now the fun stuff. Crypto has gone completely mainstream, but most people only ever see the chart. "Bitcoin is at $X, wow, crazy." The vast majority of people who use crypto are miles away from the actual technology. They don't know how it works and they're not part of any network. Every interaction goes through a third party that handles everything for them. And honestly that makes sense, because being part of a network like Bitcoin is genuinely hard now. It needs specialized hardware, and a normal computer isn't enough anymore. It didn't used to be like this. Back when Bitcoin launched in 2009, everyone who took part did it because they loved the idea, and you could do it from a regular computer. The difficulty wasn't out of this world. That gave me an idea. I wanted to build a cryptocurrency that runs completely inside a webpage. You open the page, and you are a full node. No centralized server with authority. A real decentralized currency that's as easy to take part in as opening a tab. No login, no signup, no specialized hardware, no nonsense. Even my grandma could do this. What I was going for
My role model was obviously Bitcoin. I've always been fascinated by the technology behind it because it was the first to really pull it off. I wanted my coin to stay as close to Bitcoin as possible, creating the kind of experience people had back in 2010 before it became all about the money instead of the tech with just the right adjustments to fit my ideology and actually run in a browser. Where it copies Bitcoin, and where it doesn'tMining. Bitcoin uses SHA-256, which is trivially accelerated by specialized hardware. Someone with a $2,500 miner has ~20 million times the hash power of someone on a normal PC. For a browser network that would be fatal; anyone mining in a tab would get smoked instantly. So instead I use Argon2id (32 MB of memory, 1 iteration per attempt). It's memory-hard: every hash needs a big chunk of RAM, and the bottleneck is memory bandwidth, not raw compute. GPUs and custom hardware have plenty of compute but not enough memory bandwidth per core, so they can't pull away the way they do with SHA-256. The result: mining stays roughly fair across laptops, phones, and desktops. The gap between a $20k server and a $400 laptop is small enough that everyone has a real shot at finding blocks. Networking. Like Bitcoin it's peer-to-peer, but in a browser you can't just connect by raw IP. So I use a library called PeerJS for WebRTC connections. When P2P fails, or when nobody's online yet, a small helper server steps in to introduce you to other peers. Bitcoin does something similar with hardcoded bootstrap nodes. My helper servers are completely replaceable and can be hosted by anyone. They have no authority, they can't sign blocks or mint coins, and if mine go down the network survives. They exist purely to make joining effortless. Don't trust the defaults? Point it at your own under Settings. Tokenomics. Since I like Bitcoin's monetary policy and it's widely understood, I just copied the shape of it:
And obviously: no founder allocation, no presale, no team tokens, no premine. Coins exist only because someone mined them. Difficulty. A lot of people don't realize difficulty isn't a number that only ever goes up. It tracks how many people are mining right now. If fewer people mine, it drops again. (In theory, if everyone stopped mining Bitcoin, you could find blocks on a normal computer again.) A browser network's hashrate can swing 100× when a handful of tabs open or close, so BrowserCoin retargets every block instead of every two weeks. The algorithm is ASERT, the same anchor-based exponential rule Bitcoin Cash adopted in 2020, which has a clean mathematical equilibrium at any hashrate scale, so the chain stays stable whether one tab is mining or thousands are. There's a lot more I could get into. A chain optimised for size, Ed25519 signatures, an account-based ledger, using How you actually take part
It's just a real cryptocurrency. No nonsense. If you don't want to mine and just want to see how sending and receiving works, drop your wallet address in the comments and I'll send you some coins I've already mined. There's nothing at risk and nothing to buy, so it's free to try. This project made me fall back in love with the technology. It's genuinely fun to poke at and the easiest way I know to actually understand how a cryptocurrency works from the inside. A network of strangers who don't trust each other agreeing on a shared ledger with no one in charge, using nothing but math and electricity: that's a real thing, and it works. [link] [comments] |
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