How To Contribute to the ArQmA Project

ArQmA is an open source project, and therefore it's life comes from the ArQmA community; the regular people who decide to follow the project.

An open source project has a much better chance of surviving long-term if it's community is active in the project. Here are some ways you can get involved and contribute to the success of ArQmA.

Follow the Community Discussions

Possibly the most important first step to getting involved is to simply get informed on what is going on in the ArQmA world. The various community discussions provide this touchpoint, and by engaging here, you will learn a lot about how to contribute further. We need more people discussing ArQmA, and giving their opinions and ideas for the project. Progress will accelerate with increased discussion participation. Here are some of the important discussion locations.

Core Blockchain Discussions

The first place to keep up with core blockchain topics is on the ArQmA github project. The ArQmA developer team watches the issue discussions and enhancement proposals closely on github, and when there is a lot of community feedback here, it lets the Devs know which issues are important. You can click on the Issues tab or the Pull requests tab to find topics of discussion.

Another place that the Devs hang out regularly is the ArQmA discord and Telegram channel. The discrd channel is a fine place to ask questions and get help as well. There is also a bridge that allows you to easily read the Telegram chats from within the Discord community (see below).

Community Discussions

There are several places which are more focused on general community discussions. These are places where you can ask questions, propose ideas, and get help with using ArQmA. The ArQmA Discord community is a great place to hang out, which has severl topic lobbies. Topics range from mining to crypto-news to publications and marketing. There are also lobbies which act as a bridge to the ArQmA sub-reddit and the Telegram channel.

Run a Full Local Node or Public Node

Instead of running your wallet using a remote node, you can run your own node (ArQmAd) on your own computer. Once you have arqmad set up, then you can let it run with port 19993 and 19994 open. This will not only give you maximum privacy with your transactions, it will also allow your node to participate in distributing the blockchain to new users. If you do not have the storage or bandwidth to run a local node, you can use a virtual machine on the internet to run a full node.

Mine For ArQmA

The more miners on the network, the more decentralized and secure the network remains. You can easily start mining with the start_mining command in the arqmad application or the arqma-wallet-cli application. (NOTE: This method of mining will not likely succeed in acquiring any ArQmA coins, but will still contribute to network decentralization. To successfully mine ArQmA coins, you will most likely use a separate mining application with an online mining pool.)

Be an ArQmA Content Creator

It has been said that "content is king" on the internet, and there is validity in the statement. For people who are new to crypto currencies and ArQmA, there is a need for information which is readily available and easy to understand.

A number of "How-To" guides have already been written by community members, but more is better. If you learn how to do something and there is not already a guide for that, please write one! If you aren't sure where to post it, ask the community, and someone will find a spot for your content to live online.

If you are able to document general information about ArQmA and how it fits into the world of blockchains and crypto currencies, feel free to create that content, and then ask where it should live. And lastly, if you find any existing content that is wrong or out of date, please inform the content owner or the community, so it can be updated. (If the content source is available on github, feel free to update things yourself, and submit a pull-request to that repository.)

Develop/Test/Propose ArQmA Apps and Utilities

Beyond the core blockchain and wallet applications, there are many other useful apps that can be built to further the ArQmA project. If programming in C++ is not your thing, but you can program in another language, you can lend your talents to other coding projects.

If you are not a coder, but have an idea for a useful app, you can suggest it to the community on Discord or Telegram.

Develop And/Or Test the Core ArQmA Source Code

The ArQmA core blockchain and wallet apps are primarily written in C++. If that is your language, feel free to peruse the source code, and offer to make any changes or fixes you think would be valuable. Pull requests are merged based on community consensus and core developer review.

See this Contributing to ArQmA document for more information on contributing to the code.

Spread The Word In Your Circles

For ArQmA to someday become a digital currency used by the masses, the word needs to spread that ArQmA exists as a solid option for a private, secure, and reliable digital currency. If you are reading this, you probably already know more about crypto currencies and ArQmA than most of your friends and family. Look for opportunities to introduce them to the concepts of crypto currencies. Offer to help them get their feet wet in the digital currency world, by introducing them to ArQmA. This is a fantastic way to contribute to the ArQmA project.