matwaller / reddcoin

Reddcoin: the digital social currency

Reddcoin Core integration/staging tree

https://www.reddcoin.com

Copyright (c) 2009-2018 Bitcoin Core Developers

Copyright (c) 2014-2018 Reddcoin Core Developers

What is Reddcoin?

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

Reddcoin first started in January 2014 as a variant of Litecoin using Scrypt as the Proof-of-Work (PoW) hash algorithm.

• 1 minute block target
• 100,000 coins per block
• subsidy halves every 500,000 blocks
• subsidy halves every 50,000 blocks starting at block 140,000
• difficulty retarget: every block using Kimoto's gravity well

On 2nd August 2014 at block 260,800 Reddcoin transitioned to its own original Proof-of-Stake-Velocity (PoSV) algorithm which replaced Proof-of-Work (PoW).

• 1 minute block target
• just under 27 billion mined in PoW phase
• 5% annual interest in PoSV phase
• difficulty retarget: every block using Kimoto's gravity well
• white paper: http://www.reddcoin.com/papers/PoSV.pdf
• FAQs paper: http://www.reddcoin.com/papers/PoSV_FAQ.pdf

On December 2015 work commenced on porting directly from Bitcoin v0.9 whilst maintaining the original functionality.

• allowing for better maintainabilty
• monitoring of upstream features
• improved code consistency and sharing

For more information, as well as an immediately useable, binary version of the Reddcoin Core software, see http://www.reddcoin.com

License

Reddcoin Core 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 Reddcoin 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 relevant forum channel.

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 Bitcoin.

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 can be compiled and run (assuming they weren't disabled in configure) with: make check

Every pull request is built for Windows, Linux and OSx on a dedicated server, and unit and sanity tests are automatically run. The binaries produced may be used for manual QA testing — a link to them will appear in a comment on the pull request posted by BitcoinPullTester. See https://github.com/TheBlueMatt/test-scripts for the build/test scripts.

Manual Quality Assurance (QA) Testing

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.

Translations

Changes to translations as well as new translations can be submitted to Bitcoin Core's Transifex page.

Periodically the translations are pulled from Transifex and merged into the git repository. See the translation process for details on how this works.

Important: We do not accept translation changes as github pull request because the next pull from Transifex would automatically overwrite them again.

Development tips and tricks

compiling for debugging

Run configure with the --enable-debug option, then make. Or run configure with CXXFLAGS="-g -ggdb -O0" or whatever debug flags you need.

debug.log

If the code is behaving strangely, take a look in the debug.log file in the data directory; error and debugging message are written there.

The -debug=... command-line option controls debugging; running with just -debug will turn on all categories (and give you a very large debug.log file).

The Qt code routes qDebug() output to debug.log under category "qt": run with -debug=qt to see it.

testnet and regtest modes

Run with the -testnet option to run with "play reddcoins" on the test network, if you are testing multi-machine code that needs to operate across the internet.

If you are testing something that can run on one machine, run with the -regtest option. In regression test mode blocks can be created on-demand; see qa/rpc-tests/ for tests that run in -regest mode.

DEBUG_LOCKORDER

Reddcoin Core is a multithreaded application, and deadlocks or other multithreading bugs can be very difficult to track down. Compiling with -DDEBUG_LOCKORDER (configure CXXFLAGS="-DDEBUG_LOCKORDER -g") inserts run-time checks to keep track of what locks are held, and adds warning to the debug.log file if inconsistencies are detected.