PROOF: A Peer-to-Peer Mineable Coin
Abstract. A purely peer-to-peer version of Bitcoin's mining would let coins be minted directly by work, with no GPU farm and no mining pool. PROOF reimplements Bitcoin's proof-of-work as a token on Ethereum: real hashing, difficulty that retargets, a reward that halves toward a hard cap of twenty-one million. The only coins not mined are a thin genesis liquidity wall (about one percent), which seeds the pool and is locked by burning its liquidity; the deployer holds none. Miners commit their solution blind and then reveal it, so a bot cannot copy your nonce out of the mempool and race you with it. A Uniswap V4 hook pays each miner the block subsidy plus the pool's swap fees, so as the subsidy halves the fee market sustains mining. You mine it.
1.Introduction
Bitcoin introduced money that enters circulation through work: miners search for a hash below a target, and the network mints new coins to whoever finds one first. PROOF ports that mechanism, unchanged in spirit, to a token on Ethereum. There is no team allocation and no insider mint, and the deployer holds zero. Every coin enters circulation by mining, except a thin genesis wall (about one percent) that seeds the initial liquidity and is locked in the pool by burning its liquidity tokens.
2.Proof-of-Work
To mine, a participant searches for a nonce such that the hash of the current block falls below the difficulty target. The search is real work; verification is instant. Difficulty retargets to hold a steady block time as miners come and go. The block below is being mined right now, in your browser.
3.Commit and Reveal
On a public mempool, a miner who simply broadcast a winning nonce would risk a bot copying it and racing them for the reward. PROOF mines in two steps: a miner commits the hash of a solution, then reveals it a block later. Watchers see only a blind commitment until the reveal, so a bot cannot copy your nonce and front-run you with it. The proof-of-work stays real. Ethereum secures ordering and settlement, so here the work governs fair distribution, not consensus. Mining is two transactions and costs gas, so it rewards those who value the coin above the gas, not a free faucet.
4.Halving and Supply
The block reward halves on a fixed schedule and the total supply converges to twenty-one million coins. Nothing can mint beyond the cap. The deployer holds zero; the only way in is to mine, or to buy from someone who did.
5.The Fee Market
A Uniswap V4 hook collects a small fee from every swap and pays it to the next miner alongside the block reward. Early on the reward dominates. As it halves toward zero, the swap fees carry the incentive to keep mining. This is Bitcoin's transition from subsidy to fees, running on-chain from the first block.
6.Fair Launch
The market is created by a single-sided liquidity position seeded at launch, with the liquidity tokens burned. No insider allocation and no vesting; the only minter is the immutable hook, which can mint only the mining reward and never past the cap. Each of these is verifiable at the contract address.
References
- PROOF is an homage and is not affiliated with Bitcoin or its authors.
- On this chain, proof-of-work is a fair-distribution and game mechanic, not consensus security. Ordering and settlement are secured by the chain itself.
- The in-browser miner is a client-side demonstration that grinds real SHA-256; the live chain uses keccak-256 commit-reveal. Illustrative figures are not real values until launch.
- Nothing here is financial advice. Memecoins are volatile and can go to zero. Read the full disclaimer.