Monero is a private, secure, untraceable, decentralised digital currency. You are your bank, you control your funds, and nobody can trace your transfers unless you allow them to do 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 in their own branches, submitted as a pull request, and then subsequently tested by contributors who focus on 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's codebase!** If you have a fix or code change, feel free to submit is as a pull request directly to the "master" 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: `44AFFq5kSiGBoZ4NMDwYtN18obc8AemS33DBLWs3H7otXft3XjrpDtQGv7SqSsaBYBb98uNbr2VBBEt7f2wfn3RVGQBEP3A` (viewkey: `f359631075708155cc3d92a32b75a7d02a5dcf27756707b47a2b31b21c389501`)
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).
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.
The Boost package has a bug that will prevent librpc.a from building correctly. In order to fix this, you will have to Build boost yourself from scratch. Follow the directions here (under "Building Boost"):
By default, in either dynamically or statically linked builds, binaries target the specific host processor on which the build happens and are not portable to other processors. Portable binaries can be built using the following targets:
* ```make release-static-64``` builds binaries on Linux on x86_64 portable across POSIX systems on x86_64 processors
* ```make release-static-32``` builds binaries on Linux on x86_64 or i686 portable across POSIX systems on i686 processors
* ```make release-static-arm6``` builds binaries on Linux on armv7 or armv6 portable across POSIX systems on armv6 processors, such as the Raspberry Pi
* ```make release-static-win64``` builds binaries on 64-bit Windows portable across 64-bit Windows systems
* ```make release-static-win32``` builds binaries on 64-bit or 32-bit Windows portable across 32-bit Windows systems
While Monero isn't made to integrate with Tor, it can be used wrapped with torsocks, if you add --p2p-bind-ip 127.0.0.1 to the bitmonerod command line. You also want to set DNS requests to go over TCP, so they'll be routed through Tor, by setting DNS_PUBLIC=tcp. You may also disable IGD (UPnP port forwarding negotiation), which is pointless with Tor. To allow local connections from the wallet, add TORSOCKS_ALLOW_INBOUND=1. Example:
TAILS ships with a very restrictive set of firewall rules. Therefore, you need to add a rule to allow this connection too, in addition to telling torsocks to allow inbound connections. Full example:
While bitmonerod and simplewallet do not use readline directly, most of the functionality can be obtained by running them via rlwrap. This allows command recall, edit capabilities, etc. It does not give autocompletion without an extra completion file, however. To use rlwrap, simply prepend `rlwrap` to the command line, eg:
