Introduction
------------

The Developer Guide aims to provide the information you need to understand Bitcoin and start building Bitcoin-based applications, but it is `not a specification </en/developer-reference#not-a-specification>`__. To make the best use of this documentation, you may want to install the current version of Bitcoin Core, either from `source <https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin>`__ or from a `pre-compiled executable </en/download>`__.

Questions about Bitcoin development are best asked in one of the `Bitcoin development communities </en/development#devcommunities>`__. Errors or suggestions related to documentation on Bitcoin.org can be `submitted as an issue <https://github.com/bitcoin-dot-org/bitcoin.org/issues>`__ or posted to the `bitcoin-documentation mailing list <https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/bitcoin-documentation>`__.

In the following documentation, some strings have been shortened or wrapped: “[…]” indicates extra data was removed, and lines ending in a single backslash “\\” are continued below. If you hover your mouse over a paragraph, cross-reference links will be shown in blue. If you hover over a cross-reference link, a brief definition of the term will be displayed in a tooltip.