Recap of the BrowserCoin experiment, the cryptocurrency that runs full nodes in a browser tab

A few weeks back I posted about a little experiment: a cryptocurrency that runs entirely inside a browser tab called BrowserCoin. Open a page, you're a full node. Mining is memory hard so a phone and a server farm have about the same odds. Bitcoin shaped rules, fully open source, no market, just a project to have fun with the technology.

A lot of people tried it out, and I would like to recap what happened so far, because it was pretty interesting.

A very important thing about this project: it's not selling anything. The coin was made to have fun with the technology. There is no market, you can't buy coins, you can't sell them. Coins exist because someone mined them. That's it.

This is what the tool looks like these days:

Browser Coin Landing Page

Okay. What's happened, roughly in order:

A wave of you showed up. The first post sent a ton of people in. At peak times there were 600+ people mining.

People started building. Mini games, a faucet, mining pools, little tools and toys I had nothing to do with. Watching strangers build on something was very cool to see.

Community made Projects

Someone fixed my biggest weakness. In a browser you can't connect to peers by raw IP, so you need a couple of helper servers to introduce new tabs to the network, and I was running the defaults, which made me a soft point of failure for joining. A community member wrote a way better system: helpers are now discovered automatically, anyone can run one, no approval from me. They're just bootstrap hints. Your browser still validates every block locally, so a helper can't forge anything or touch your coins. That was the last slightly centralized bit, and it wasn't even me who killed it.

Advertise Helper Server Feature

It became more decentralized and way less killable by attacking a single server. The whole chain now backs itself up to a public repo every hour, re-verifying everything from scratch each time. If every server and tab vanished overnight, anyone could bring the network back in about fifteen minutes. Every clone is another permanent, verifiable copy.

Quality of life. Faster wallet loading, a better block explorer, and a pop-out miner, a little floating window with live hashrate and CPU sliders so you can keep mining while you do other stuff. All cool features that were developed while the chain was up and running.

I burned ~195k BRC (those were mined when it was mostly just me testing the chain, so I thought it made sense to burn them) to a dead address. Gone forever, no key exists, tagged in the explorer. The address is 000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000dead, which is kinda fun.

Top holder with burn Wallet

People are still out here mining, and the next big challenge is doing the first hard fork. The next step is adding scripts.

BrowserCoin now has a scripting engine: lock coins behind a secret and a key, a raw-script mode, a full opcode reference, and lock/redeem transactions decoded and explained in the explorer. Same chain, your balance and history carry straight over. It activates automatically off the chain's own clock on July 5, so every updated tab flips at the same block, just refresh before then.

Scripting Countdown Banner

Once scripts are added there's a lot of other cool stuff to experiment with.

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, and now a community building games and faucets on top of it. Still the most fun thing I've made. No nonsense.

So far it was very fun. No one lost anything, no one gained anything but knowledge. An experiment to have fun with the technology the way it should be.