Bitcore
=======

A pure, powerful core for your bitcoin project.

Bitcore is a complete, native interface to the Bitcoin network, and provides the core functionality needed to develop apps for bitcoin.

#Principles
Bitcoin is a powerful new peer-to-peer platform for the next generation of financial technology. The decentralized nature of the Bitcoin network allows for highly resilient bitcoin infrastructure, and the developer community needs reliable, open-source tools to implement bitcoin apps and services.

**Bitcore unchains developers from fallible, centralized APIs, and provides the tools to interact with the real Bitcoin network.**

#Get Started

Bitcore runs on [node](http://nodejs.org/), and can be installed via [npm](https://npmjs.org/):
```
npm install bitcore
```

It is a collection of objects useful to bitcoin applications; class-like idioms are enabled via [Classtool](https://github.com/gasteve/classtool). In most cases, a developer will require the object's class directly:
```
var Address = require('bitcore/Address').class();
```

#Examples

Validating a Bitcoin address:
```
var Address = require('bitcore/Address').class();

var addr = new Address("1A1zP1eP5QGefi2DMPTfTL5SLmv7DivfNa");

try {
  addr.validate();
  console.log("Address is valid.");
} catch(e) {
  console.log(addr.data + " is not a valid address. " + e);
}
```

#Security
Please use at your own risk.

Bitcore is still under heavy development and not quite ready for "drop-in" production use. If you find a security issue, please email security@bitcore.io.

#Contributing
Bitcore needs some developer love. Please send pull requests for bug fixes, code optimization, and ideas for improvement.

Work to enable Bitcore for use in the browser is ongoing. To build bitcore for the browser:
```
npm install -g grunt-cli
grunt browserify
```

#License

**Code released under [the MIT license](https://github.com/bitpay/bitcore/blob/master/LICENSE).**

Copyright 2013-2014 BitPay, Inc. Bitcore is a trademark maintained by BitPay, Inc.


[![Bitdeli Badge](https://d2weczhvl823v0.cloudfront.net/bitpay/bitcore/trend.png)](https://bitdeli.com/free "Bitdeli Badge")