exchange/README

                       Welcome to GNU Taler


What is Taler?
==============

Taler is an electronic payment system providing the ability to pay
anonymously using digital cash.  Taler consists of a network protocol
definition (using a RESTful API over HTTP), a Mint (which creates
digital coins), a Wallet (which allows customers to manage, store and
spend digital coins), and a Merchant website which allows customers to
spend their digital coins.  Naturally, each Merchant is different, but
Taler includes code examples to help Merchants integrate Taler as a
payment system.

Taler is currently developed by a worldwide group of independent free
software developers and the DECENTRALISE team at Inria Rennes.  Taler
is free software and a GNU package (http://www.gnu.org/).

This is not even a release yet, but some raw development prototype
that does not work yet.  This package also only includes the Taler
mint, not the other components of the system.

Documentation about Taler can be found at http://taler.net/.


Dependencies:
=============

These are the direct dependencies for running a Taler mint:

- GNUnet            >= 0.10.2
- GNU libmicrohttpd >= 0.9.38
- Postgres          >= 9.3



Project structure is currently as follows:

src/include/
  -- installed headers for public APIs

src/util/
  -- common utility functions (currency representation,
     Taler-specific cryptography, Taler-specific json
     support)

src/pq/
  -- Postgres-specific utility functions

src/mintdb/
  -- Mint database backend (with DB-specific plugins)

src/mint/
  -- taler mint server

src/mint-tools/
  -- taler mint helper programs

src/mint-lib/
  -- libtalermint: C API to issue HTTP requests to mint