Monero is a private, secure, untraceable, decentralised digital currency. You are your bank, you control your funds, and nobody can trace your transfers unless you allow them to do so.
**Privacy:** Monero uses a cryptographically sound system to allow you to send and receive funds without your transactions being easily revealed on the blockchain (the ledger of transactions that everyone has). This ensures that your purchases, receipts, and all transfers remain absolutely private by default.
**Security:** Using the power of a distributed peer-to-peer consensus network, every transaction on the network is cryptographically secured. Individual wallets have a 25 word mnemonic seed that is only displayed once, and can be written down to backup the wallet. Wallet files are encrypted with a passphrase to ensure they are useless if stolen.
**Untraceability:** By taking advantage of ring signatures, a special property of a certain type of cryptography, Monero is able to ensure that transactions are not only untraceable, but have an optional measure of ambiguity that ensures that transactions cannot easily be tied back to an individual user or computer.
This is the GUI for the [core Monero implementation](https://github.com/monero-project/monero). It is open source and completely free to use without restrictions, except for those specified in the license agreement below. There are no restrictions on anyone creating an alternative implementation of Monero that uses the protocol and network in a compatible manner.
As with many development projects, the repository on Github is considered to be the "staging" area for the latest changes. Before changes are merged into that branch on the main repository, they are tested by individual developers in their own branches, submitted as a pull request, and then subsequently tested by contributors who focus on testing and code reviews. That having been said, the repository should be carefully considered before using it in a production environment, unless there is a patch in the repository for a particular show-stopping issue you are experiencing. It is generally a better idea to use a tagged release for stability.
Monero is a 100% community-sponsored endeavor. If you want to join our efforts, the easiest thing you can do is support the project financially. Both Monero and Bitcoin donations can be made to **donate.getmonero.org** if using a client that supports the [OpenAlias](https://openalias.org) standard.
The Monero donation address is: `44AFFq5kSiGBoZ4NMDwYtN18obc8AemS33DBLWs3H7otXft3XjrpDtQGv7SqSsaBYBb98uNbr2VBBEt7f2wfn3RVGQBEP3A` (viewkey: `f359631075708155cc3d92a32b75a7d02a5dcf27756707b47a2b31b21c389501`)
There are also several mining pools that kindly donate a portion of their fees, [a list of them can be found on our Bitcointalk post](https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=583449.0).
*Note*: Qt 5.7 is the minimum version required to build the GUI. This makes **some** distributions (mostly based on debian, like Ubuntu 16.x or Linux Mint 18.x) obsolete. You can still build the GUI if you install an [official Qt release](https://wiki.qt.io/Install_Qt_5_on_Ubuntu), but this is not officially supported.
*Note*: If cmake can not find zmq.hpp file on OS X, installing `zmq.hpp` from https://github.com/zeromq/cppzmq to `/usr/local/include` should fix that error.
You find more details about those dependencies in the [Monero documentation](https://github.com/monero-project/monero). Note that that there is no more need to compile Boost from source; like everything else, you can install it now with a MSYS2 package.
**Note:** The use of `source` above is a dirty workaround for a suspected bug in the current QT version 5.11.2-3 available in the MSYS2 packaging system, see https://github.com/monero-project/monero-gui/issues/1559 for more info.
