First of all, if you have Macports, do yourself a favor and get rid of it.

Then make sure you have Homebrew installed and all the packages installed by it up to date.

1. Let’s install all the dependencies for Bitcoin hacking.

brew install autoconf automake berkeley-db4 boost miniupnpc openssl pkg-config protobuf qt libtool

2. Make sure you have the right OpenSSL version installed. Type the following on your terminal:

openssl version

you should see “OpenSSL 1.0.1f 6 Jan 2014.”

if you see an older version, do

brew update
brew upgrade

OpenSSL should be upgraded, you may or may not have to issue a “brew link openssl” or even a “brew link --overwrite openssl” if it’s giving you trouble.

3. Now, let’s configure, and make. I strongly suggest you add the boost library path when configuring, otherwise you may get nasty “Undefined symbols for architecture x86_64” compilation errors. During the time I wrote this, homebrew had installed boost 1.55 in my system, and the boost lib path was /usr/local/Cellar/boost/1.55.0/lib so I invoked the following:

./configure --with-boost-libdir=/usr/local/Cellar/boost/1.55.0/lib

After that I just issued a

make

And I was done.

If you want to hack the bitcoin-qt client like me, head to src/qt/, there should be a bitcoin-qt executable there now.

Enjoy