Monero is a private, secure, untraceable currency. You are your bank, you control your funds, and nobody can trace your transfers unless you decide so.
**Privacy:** Monero uses a cryptographically sound system to allow you to send and receive funds without your transactions being easily revealed on the blockchain (the ledger of transactions that everyone has). This ensures that your purchases, receipts, and all transfers remain absolutely private by default.
**Security:** Using the power of a distributed peer-to-peer consensus network, every transaction on the network is cryptographically secured. Individual wallets have a 24 word mnemonic seed that is only displayed once, and can be written down to backup the wallet. Wallet files are encrypted with a passphrase to ensure they are useless if stolen.
**Untraceability:** By taking advantage of ring signatures, a special property of a certain type of cryptography, Monero is able to ensure that transactions are not only untraceable, but have an optional measure of ambiguity that ensures that transactions cannot easily be tied back to an individual user or computer.
This is the core implementation of Monero. It is open source and completely free to use without restrictions, except for those specified in the license agreement below. There are no restrictions on anyone creating an alternative implementation of Monero that uses the protocol and network in a compatible manner.
As with many development projects, the repository on Github is considered to be the "staging" area for the latest changes. Before changes are merged into that branch on the main repository, they are tested by individual developers, committed to the "development" branch, and then subsequently tested by contributors who focus on thorough testing and code reviews. That having been said, the repository should be carefully considered before using it in a production environment, unless there is a patch in the repository for a particular show-stopping issue you are experiencing. It is generally a better idea to use a tagged release for stability.
Anyone is welcome to contribute to Monero. If you have a fix or code change, feel free to submit is as a pull request directly to the "development" branch. In cases where the change is relatively small or does not affect other parts of the codebase it may be merged in immediately by any one of the collaborators. On the other hand, if the change is particularly large or complex, it is expected that it will be discussed at length either well in advance of the pull request being submitted, or even directly on the pull request.
The Monero donation address is: 46BeWrHpwXmHDpDEUmZBWZfoQpdc6HaERCNmx1pEYL2rAcuwufPN9rXHHtyUA4QVy66qeFQkn6sfK8aHYjA3jk3o1Bv16em (viewkey: e422831985c9205238ef84daf6805526c14d96fd7b059fe68c7ab98e495e5703)
The Bitcoin donation address is: 1FhnVJi2V1k4MqXm2nHoEbY5LV7FPai7bb
Core development funding and/or some supporting services are also graciously provided by sponsors:
There are also several mining pools that kindly donate a portion of their fees, [a list of them can be found on our Bitcointalk post](https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=583449.0).
Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:
1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
3. Neither the name of the copyright holder nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.
THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS "AS IS" AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE COPYRIGHT HOLDER OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.
Parts of the project are originally copyright (c) 2012-2013 The Cryptonote developers
Dependencies: GCC 4.7.3 or later, CMake 2.8.6 or later, libunbound 1.4.16 or later (note: Unbound is not a dependency, libunbound is), libevent 2.0 or later, libgtest 1.5 or later, and Boost 1.53 or later (except 1.54, [more details here](http://goo.gl/RrCFmA)).
* Install the dependencies (see below for more detailed instructions for your OS)
* To build, change to the root of the source code directory, and run `make`. Please note that Windows systems follow a slightly different process, outlined below.
Dependencies: mingw-w64, msys2, CMake 2.8.6 or later, libunbound 1.4.16 or later (note: Unbound is not a dependency, libunbound is), and Boost 1.53 or 1.55 (except 1.54, [more details here](http://goo.gl/RrCFmA)), BerkeleyDB 4.8 or later (note: on Ubuntu this means installing libdb-dev and libdb++-dev).
* Download the [MSYS2 installer](http://msys2.github.io), 64-bit or 32-bit as needed, and run it.
* Use the shortcut associated with your architecture to launch the MSYS2 environment. On 64-bit systems that would be the MinGW-w64 Win64 Shell shortcut. Note that if you are running 64-bit Windows, you will have both 64-bit and 32-bit environments.
* Update the packages in your MSYS2 install:
```
pacman -Sy
pacman -Su --ignoregroup base
pacman -Su
```
* For those of you already familiar with pacman, you can run the normal `pacman -Syu` to update, but you may get errors and need to restart MSYS2 if pacman's dependencies are updated.
* If you are planning to build statically you will also need to install: `pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-ldns mingw-w64-x86_64-expat` (note that these are likely already installed by the unbound dependency installation above)
