VoteCoin is an implementation of the "Zerocash" protocol. Forked from ZCash, based on Bitcoin's code, it intends to offer a far higher standard of privacy through a sophisticated zero-knowledge proving scheme that preserves confidentiality of transaction metadata. Technical details are available in our Protocol Specification.
This software is the VoteCoin client. It downloads and stores the entire history of VoteCoin transactions; depending on the speed of your computer and network connection, the synchronization process could take a day or more once the blockchain has reached a significant size.
VoteCoin is experimental and a work-in-progress. Use at your own risk.
This release is considered deprecated 16 weeks after the release day. There is an automatic deprecation shutdown feature which will halt the node some time after this 16 week time period. The automatic feature is based on block height and can be explicitly disabled.
There is a precompiled Windows version of VoteCoin. You can download it from https://github.com/Tomas-M/VoteCoin/releases/ The download is 853 MB due to zkSNARK proving key which is included in the release. Simply unzip and read README.txt. If you use precompiled Windows binaries, you can skip to the section "Running" in this document now.
If you prefer to build VoteCoin from source code, you can do so by running the following commands in Linux:
git clone https://github.com/Tomas-M/VoteCoin.git
cd ./VoteCoin/zcutil
./votecoin_build_debian.sh # for debian/ubuntu based systems
This will also setup your votecoin.conf file in ~/.votecoin directory, if the file does not exist yet.
The above mentioned command should configure your votecoin already by creating ~/.votecoin/votecoin.conf for you. The file can be generated manually by running
mkdir -p ~/.votecoin
echo "addnode=mainnet.votecoin.site" >~/.votecoin/votecoin.conf
echo "rpcuser=username" >>~/.votecoin/votecoin.conf
echo "rpcpassword=`head -c 32 /dev/urandom | base64`" >>~/.votecoin/votecoin.conf
Solo mining with CPU is currently not worth. If you plan to mine VoteCoin, you should join a pool. There are several pools in operation at the moment, for example:
http://pool.votecoin.site
http://nibirupool.com
https://luckpool.org/
https://pool.miningspeed.com
https://zsolo.bid/
http://votecoin.catspool.org/
https://multipool.es
http://pcmining.xyz:8080
https://vot.lucky-mining.com.ua
Compiled binaries can be found in ./src directory. Copy them to your working path:
cp ./src/votecoin-cli /usr/bin
cp ./src/votecoind /usr/bin
cp ./zcutil/vot /usr/bin
$ votecoind
Once votecoind daemon is running, you may use votecoin-cli from another console to send commands to the daemon. For example, to generate new transparent address, simply call:
$ votecoin-cli getnewaddress
t14oHp2v54vfmdgQ3v3SNuQga8JKHTNi2a1
$ votecoin-cli z_getnewaddress
zcBqWB8VDjVER7uLKb4oHp2v54v2a1jKd9o4FY7mdgQ3gDfG8MiZLvdQga8JK3t58yjXGjQHzMzkGUxSguSs6ZzqpgTNiZG
$ votecoin-cli getbalance
$ votecoin-cli z_getbalance t14oHp2v54vfmdgQ3v3SNuQga8JKHTNi2a1
$ votecoin-cli z_getbalance zcBqWB8VDjVER7uLKb4oHp2v54v2a1jKd9o4FY7mdgQ3gDfG8MiZLvdQga8JK3t58yjXGjQHzMzkGUxSguSs6ZzqpgTNiZG
$ votecoin-cli z_sendmany FROM_ADDR '[{"address": "TO_ADDR", "amount": 123}]' 1 0
In the above mentioned example, both FROM_ADDR and TO_ADDR can be either T addresses or Z addresses or combination. The last two numbers (1 0) stand for minConf and fee. In the example above, the coins on FROM_ADDR must have at least 1 confirmation, and fee is set to zero.
Alternatively, if you don't care from which address the coins are sent, you can use:
$ votecoin-cli sendtoaddress TO_ADDR 123
In that case, coins may be combined from multiple addresses.
Remember that coinbase transaction (sending newly mined coins) must be done from a T address to a Z address. So if you wish to send newly mined coins to a T address, you need to send them to a Z address first and then make another transaction from that Z address to the T address destination.
After a transaction is executed using z_sendmany, you can check its status by using:
$ votecoin-cli z_getoperationresult
$ votecoin-cli z_exportwallet exportfilename
You may need to specify export directory path using for example "exportdir=/tmp" in your ~/.votecoin/votecoin.conf
There is a script called 'vot' for easier operation. It calls votecoin-cli with proper syntax. You may use it instead of votecoin-cli for selected commands:
$ vot addr ... generate new T address
$ vot zaddr ... generate new Z address
$ vot send FROM TO AMOUNT ... send coins FROM address to TO address of given AMOUNT, with zero fee
$ vot status ... show status of last transaction. Empty status means transaction still in progress
$ vot totals ... show total balances in your entire wallet
$ vot list ... list all addresses and their balances (non-zero only)
$ vot export ... show all your wallet addresses including their private keys
Remember that the last two commands need to export your wallet to a temporary file, so if you are using a computer in shared environment (eg. a server where other users can login) then you need to make sure other users do not have access to the exported file. The exported file is deleted after the vot script finishes, but is accessible while the script is still running (eg. fetching balances etc).
For license information see the file COPYING.