Bitcoin PoS Core integration/staging tree

Bitcoin Proof of Stake

What is Bitcoin PoS?

Bitcoin PoS is an digital currency that enables instant payments to anyone, anywhere in the world. Bitcoin PoS uses peer-to-peer technology to operate with no central authority: managing transactions and issuing money are carried out collectively by the network. Bitcoin PoS Core is the name of open source software which enables the use of this currency.

Bitcoin PoS Core is built on top of Bitcoin Core. The difference between the two is the consensus algorithm: Bitcoin PoS Core uses Proof of Stake consensus, whilst Bitcoin Core uses Proof of Work. Using Proof of Stake as a consensus algorithm is allowing it not only to scale better and be orders of magnitude more efficient in terms of power consumption, but it is also lowering the entry barrier for contributing to the creation of new blocks.

For more information, as well as an immediately usable, binary version of the Bitcoin PoS Core software, see https://www.bitcoinpos.net/#wallet-bps, or read the original whitepaper.

License

Bitcoin PoS Core is released under the terms of the MIT license. See COPYING for more information or see https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT.

Development Process

The master branch is regularly built (see doc/build-*.md for instructions) and tested, but it is not guaranteed to be completely stable. Tags are created regularly from release branches to indicate new official, stable release versions of Bitcoin PoS Core.

The contribution workflow is described in CONTRIBUTING.md and useful hints for developers can be found in doc/developer-notes.md.

Testing

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

Automated Testing

Developers are strongly encouraged to write unit tests for new code, and to submit new unit tests for old code. Unit tests can be compiled and run (assuming they weren't disabled in configure) with: make check. Further details on running and extending unit tests can be found in /src/test/README.md.

There are also regression and integration tests, written in Python, that are run automatically on the build server. These tests can be run (if the test dependencies are installed) with: test/functional/test_runner.py

The Travis CI system makes sure that every pull request is built for Windows, Linux, and macOS, and that unit/sanity tests are run automatically.

Manual Quality Assurance (QA) Testing

Changes should be tested by somebody other than the developer who wrote the code. This is especially important for large or high-risk changes. It is useful to add a test plan to the pull request description if testing the changes is not straightforward.