1. Abstract
Royal Irish Coin (RIC) is a teaching chain. It reproduces the mechanics of a proof-of-work cryptocurrency — blocks, hashes, difficulty, a mempool, halvings, peer gossip and chain reorganisation — inside a single browser session, with no servers, no tokens and no money involved.
The goal is comprehension, not speculation. Every part of the system that a real chain hides behind infrastructure is exposed here as something you can press, drag or watch.
2. The ledger
The chain is an ordered list of blocks. Each block carries a height, the hash of its predecessor, a timestamp, a list of transactions, a nonce and the difficulty target it was mined against. Changing any field changes the block's hash, which breaks every block after it — the property that makes a chain tamper-evident.
Balances are not stored. They are derived by replaying the chain from the genesis block and then applying anything still sitting in the transaction pool, exactly as a real light client would.
3. Mining and difficulty
Mining repeatedly increments a nonce and rehashes the block header until the resulting hash begins with the required number of leading zeros. Difficulty is adjustable from one to five zeros so the cost of a block can be felt rather than described.
The miner of a block collects the block reward plus the fees of the transactions they include. Unconfirmed transfers stay in the pool until somebody mines them in.
4. Supply and halving
The base block reward is 25 RIC. The reward halves every N blocks, where N is set by the operator, and stops falling at a floor of 0.01 RIC. The wallet shows the current era, the reward for the next block and the number of blocks left until the next halving.
Because the interval is configurable, an era that takes four years on a production chain can be observed in a minute here.
5. Peer network
Six simulated nodes — your own plus Dublin, Cork, Galway, Limerick and Belfast — hold their own copies of the chain and mempool. Transactions and blocks propagate hop by hop with a latency you control.
Peers mine independently, which produces genuine forks. Nodes resolve them with the longest-chain rule: when a peer sees a heavier chain, it reorganises onto it and returns the orphaned transactions to its pool.
6. Knights of Temple Bar
The membership layer sits on top of the ledger. A holder can claim the King's Coins airdrop against a simulated Bitcoin balance, then swap through the exchange house. Swapping issues a Green Card: a Celtic pass with a unique serial, the holder's name, a rank of Squire, Knight or Grand Knight, and an entry on the public roster.
Every claim and swap is an ordinary on-chain transaction, so membership is auditable in the block explorer like anything else.
7. Humanitarian Fund
A ten-million allocation is reserved for humanitarian causes. The steward claims the allocation into the treasury and then directs donations to individual causes, each with its own address and goal. Progress is tracked per cause and in aggregate.
Amounts are shown in whichever currency the operator selects — pound sterling, Swiss franc, euro, dollar or shillings — at a per-coin price the operator sets. The rate is a display convention for the simulation, not a market price.
8. What this is not
RIC is not a currency, a security, an investment or a fundraising vehicle. There is no exchange, no issuance, no custody and no counterparty. Hashing and key derivation are deterministic demonstrations, not cryptographically secure primitives, and the state lives in your browser's local storage — clearing it clears the chain.
Nothing on this site is financial advice.