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: `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).
Dependencies: GCC 4.7.3 or later, CMake 3.0.0 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)), BerkeleyDB 4.8 or later (note: on Ubuntu this means installing libdb-dev and libdb++-dev).
* 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 3.0.0 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.
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"):
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:
