Litecoin integration/staging tree ================================ http://www.litecoin.org Copyright (c) 2009-2013 Bitcoin Developers Copyright (c) 2011-2013 Litecoin Developers What is Litecoin? ---------------- Litecoin is a lite version of Bitcoin using scrypt as a proof-of-work algorithm. - 2.5 minute block targets - subsidy halves in 840k blocks (~4 years) - ~84 million total coins The rest is the same as Bitcoin. - 50 coins per block - 2016 blocks to retarget difficulty For more information, as well as an immediately useable, binary version of the Litecoin client sofware, see http://www.litecoin.org. License ------- Litecoin is released under the terms of the MIT license. See `COPYING` for more information or see http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT. Development process ------------------- 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 Litecoin 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 [mailing list](http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?forum_name=bitcoin-development). 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.txt`) or are controversial. The `master` branch is regularly built 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 Litecoin. Testing ------- 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. ### Automated Testing 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: cd src; make -f makefile.unix test 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 ./litecoin-qt_test