bitcoin/README.md

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Bitcoin Core integration/staging tree
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=====================================
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https://bitcoincore.org
What is Bitcoin?
----------------
Bitcoin is an experimental digital currency that enables instant payments to
anyone, anywhere in the world. Bitcoin uses peer-to-peer technology to operate
with no central authority: managing transactions and issuing money are carried
out collectively by the network. Bitcoin Core is the name of open source
software which enables the use of this currency.
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For more information, as well as an immediately usable, binary version of
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the Bitcoin Core software, see https://bitcoincore.org/en/download/, or read the
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[original whitepaper](https://bitcoincore.org/bitcoin.pdf).
License
-------
Bitcoin Core is released under the terms of the MIT license. See [COPYING](COPYING) for more
information or see https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT.
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Development Process
-------------------
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The `master` branch is regularly built (see doc/build-*.md for instructions) and tested, but is not guaranteed to be
completely stable. [Tags](https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/tags) are created
regularly to indicate new official, stable release versions of Bitcoin Core.
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The contribution workflow is described in [CONTRIBUTING.md](CONTRIBUTING.md)
and useful hints for developers can be found in [doc/developer-notes.md](doc/developer-notes.md).
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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
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Developers are strongly encouraged to write [unit tests](src/test/README.md) for new code, and to
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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](/src/test/README.md).
There are also [regression and integration tests](/test), written
in Python, that are run automatically on the build server.
These tests can be run (if the [test dependencies](/test) 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.
Translations
------------
Changes to translations as well as new translations can be submitted to
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[Bitcoin Core's Transifex page](https://www.transifex.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/).
Translations are periodically pulled from Transifex and merged into the git repository. See the
[translation process](doc/translation_process.md) for details on how this works.
**Important**: We do not accept translation changes as GitHub pull requests because the next
pull from Transifex would automatically overwrite them again.
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Translators should also subscribe to the [mailing list](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/bitcoin-translators).