http://primecoin.org

Copyright (c) 2013 Primecoin Developers

Copyright (c) 2009-2013 Bitcoin Developers

Copyright (c) 2011-2013 PPCoin Developers

Primecoin is an experimental cryptocurrency that introduces the first scientific computing proof-of-work to cryptocurrency technology. Primecoin's proof-of-work is an innovative design based on searching for prime number chains, providing potential scientific value in addition to minting and security for the network. Similar to Bitcoin, Primecoin enables instant payments to anyone, anywhere in the world. It also uses peer-to-peer technology to operate with no central authority: managing transactions and issuing money are carried out collectively by the network. Primecoin is also the name of the open source software which enables the use of this currency.

For more information, as well as an immediately useable, binary version of the Primecoin client sofware, see http://primecoin.org.

Primecoin is released under conditional MIT license. See COPYING` for more information.

Developers work in their own trees, then submit pull requests when they think their feature or bug fix is ready.

If it is a simple/trivial/non-controversial change, then one of the Bitcoin development team members simply pulls it.

If it is a more complicated or potentially controversial change, then the patch submitter will be asked to start a discussion (if they haven't already) on the ppcoin/primecoin forum (https://talk.peercoin.net).

The patch will be accepted if there is broad consensus that it is a good thing. Developers should expect to rework and resubmit patches if the code doesn't match the project's coding conventions (see doc/coding.md) or are controversial.

The master branch is regularly built and tested, but is not guaranteed to be completely stable. Tags are created regularly to indicate new official, stable release versions of Primecoin.

Testing and code review is the bottleneck for development; we get more pull requests than we can review and test. Please be patient and help out, and remember this is a security-critical project where any mistake might cost people lots of money.

Developers are strongly encouraged to write unit tests for new code, and to submit new unit tests for old code.

Unit tests for the core code are in src/test/. To compile and run them:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install build-essential
sudo apt-get install -y build-essential autoconf libtool pkg-config libboost-all-dev libssl-dev libevent-dev libqt5gui5 libqt5core5a libqt5dbus5 qttools5-dev qttools5-dev-tools libprotobuf-dev protobuf-compiler libqrencode-dev libminiupnpc-dev curl
git clone https://github.com/primecoin/primecoin.git
cd primecoin

(In ubuntu 20.04)
cd depends; make
export BOOST_INCLUDE_PATH=`pwd`/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu/include
export BDB_INCLUDE_PATH=`pwd`/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu/include
export OPENSSL_INCLUDE_PATH=`pwd`/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu/include
export BOOST_LIB_PATH=`pwd`/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu/lib
export BOOST_LIB_SUFFIX=-mt
cd ..
cd src ; make -f makefile.unix USE_UPNP:=

(For other systems)
cd src ; make -f makefile.unix

Unit tests for the GUI code are in src/qt/test/. To compile and run them:

qmake BITCOIN_QT_TEST=1 -o Makefile.test bitcoin-qt.pro
make -f Makefile.test
./bitcoin-qt_test

Large changes should have a test plan, and should be tested by somebody other than the developer who wrote the code.

See https://github.com/bitcoin/QA/ for how to create a test plan.