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[DISCUSSION] Setting up a bitcoin service for Greece
by
Serenata
on 05/09/2012, 11:42:10 UTC

Seeing the ultra-low adoption of bitcoin in Greece, I've decided to try setting up some useful services that might draw people's attention to bitcoin. My first idea is of a web site that will provide users the ability to send SMS messages to Greek mobiles, at low rates (or free if the service becomes self-sustainable). What I've come up with are the following:

  • There should be some kind of account management, i.e. registration, email conformation, password reset link for forgotten passwords, etc
  • Points managements. Users will deposit coins to a given bitcoin address to get points and those points will be used to send SMS messages. One point = one SMS (no ads whatsoever - full 160-character messages).
  • There should be some kind of automated method to credit the user's account with points based on a bitcoin transaction.
  • SMS messages will be sent via an SMS gateway, using an API and a callback URL for handling status codes.

The site could be a standalone one, or it could be something integrated into BitcoinX.gr (wordpress). I don't expect to make money out of this, so I'd prefer open source code.

Questions incoming...
I suppose it could take me a lot of time to code something like that myself, so I was wondering if:
  • you think it's a good idea. SMS messages are quite popular in Greece but a bit overpriced (10-12 cents per SMS). I could offer something close to 6 cents per SMS.
  • you know any open source project that does something similar to the above (either be it a wordpress plugin or a standalone project - if it's a wordpress plugin, account management would be the same used by wordpress itself)
  • you have any suggestion about the coding language, if I had to write the code from scratch
  • you could suggest a way to handle the payments (one unique deposit address for every user, monitor the addresses and add points to the users' accounts as soon as a payment has one confirmation?)
  • you have any other comments or suggestions

The thread is open to any other info or discussion concerning relative things like SMS gateways, considerations, best practices, SMS character sets etc, etc.

Thanks in advance.