Sandia, please check the prices at http://www.coinxchange.ph.  Prices better than other local exchanges, and you can buy/sell up to PHP 25,000 a day without submitting docs.

You'll never get prices exactly at BitStamp levels for a couple of reasons:
First, BitStamp and BTC-e are priced in dollars, and if you're buying or selling in pesos, then there's a conversion involved.
Secondly, to buy/sell at BitStamp or BTC-e, you have to do an international wire transfer, which takes time and costs money.  If you buy at a local exchange like coinxchange.ph, you can buy/sell on the same day.  You can also deposit from or take a withdrawal to your local bank account for free.

Plus of course we provide local support in the ph time zone

Disclosure: I'm an owner of coinxchange.ph

It's every new block.  If you use the %s value in your shell script (or command line batch file, etc.) it will get replaced with the block's hash value.  Which you can then look up using your favorite service or using json-rpc.

Dabs will be along as soon as he is awake to post in this thread .  He's been a great resource to have on the project and has many good ideas.

That is a virtual office. The development team is primarily in the US with local banking and customer support in the Philippines.  As we are just starting, we chose a virtual office to provide phone services and such as needed.

Thanks,

Chris Williams

reserved

Coinxchange, a bitcoin exchange with integrated wallet services, is now operating!

Coinxchange serves the Philippine market by providing bitcoin buy/sell services quoted in Philippine pesos (PHP).  We provide same-day deposits to major local banks.

Security is our top priority and we take the following steps, among others:

• two-factor authentication
• store all sensitive data in encrypted form
• hot wallet/cold wallet approach to mitigate risk.

After you make a deposit, you can buy bitcoin and receive them instantly. You always know the price you're receiving, because orders are processed in real time. Learn more: https://www.coinxchange.ph/how

I'm an owner of the company and a developer on the project.  You can learn more about my background on the about page.  The well-respected "Dabs" from bitcointalk is also a director in the company.

Please give us a try: http://www.coinxchange.ph.

skyrunner did you download the 64 bit version of the Windows installer (https://bitcoin.org/bin/0.9.0/) or 32 bit?

I'm running bitcoind on an Azure virtual machine, but I chose Ubuntu.  Before I settled on Linux, I did create a Windows 2012 vm as you did and didn't encounter any issues.  But this was with the x86 version of Bitcoin 0.8.6.

As Bitcoin is a protocol, it's entirely up to you which language you choose in order to interact with the protocol and build your app.

There are several pre-built libraries around, such as bitcoinj in Java (https://code.google.com/p/bitcoinj/), Insight (https://github.com/bitpay/insight) which uses node.js, and many more.  It all depends on where your comfort level is and what you want to build.

Thanks for the message.  We think it's pretty cool too.

Will definitely hook you up with a beta invite when we can.  Just working out the banking issues at this point so we can get Php in and out.

Appreciate the interest!

Developers with the skills you seek are very expensive and in high demand. Depending on your funding situation, you may be better off just hiring smart developers and have them pick up Bitcoin.

Hi, I initially posted in this forum https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=27736.msg4375276#msg4375276 on Jan 7th, indicating that I was working on a Bitcoin exchange for the Philippines. That work is nearly complete and the exchange will start testing with live users soon.  You can see the public side at http://www.coinxchange.ph. The exchange is meant to be a Coinbase-style exchange with full wallet services and deposit/withdrawal services to major Philippine banks. The buy/sell spreads are quite reasonable compared with other local competing exchanges and we offer a compelling feature set.

As I mentioned in my initial post, the exchange will be fully licensed as a Philippine money services business and comply with all local laws.  To that end, the company will be registered as a Philippine Domestic Corporation, with $200,000USD in initial paid-in capital.

Which brings me to the point of this post.  I'm not a Philippine resident or citizen, nor are any of the other developers or investors. I'm based in the US as is my team, although we intend to hire a local staff.  To legally register as a Philippine Domestic Corporation, I need to have a majority of the Directors of the company be Philippine residents and one needs to be a Philippine citizen.

If you are interested in helping bring a solid, legal Bitcoin exchange to the Philippines, please reply to me in a private message. I am not asking for any funding nor will this require any of your time. I ask that you reply with your real name and your citizenship/residency status and I'll provide you with more details, including my name, and answer any questions you might have.  The individuals selected to become Directors will receive a share of stock in the company at no charge.

Thanks, and really looking forward to starting something great.

I think everyone is saying to themselves "this is a very complex topic and you are just asking to get hacked and lose all of your coins if you aren't completely on-point with your security procedures".  Or, maybe that was just what I was thinking.

I'd try some basic research first by searching these forums.  Then, if you have more specific questions, come back with those.

Here's a free link to get you started that helped me quite a bit: http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/18402/what-is-the-safest-method-managing-a-large-number-of-receiving-bitcoin-addresses

Thanks to those that replied, including @tagbond, @Dabs and @execute. I appreciate your insights. 

I'm based in Las Vegas, USA, so unfortunately can't attend this meetup but I'll bet you'll see me at one in the near future.  I'm going to get the code nearer to test-ready stage, and then complete the company registration and banking locally. @tagbond, like you I plan to create a 100m Peso company so that I can register as a foreign-owned corporation although we'll have a local office.

Hi,

I'm a professional software developer and I've been working on writing a Bitcoin exchange from scratch.  I think the Philippines may be a good location to open an Exchange and the legal requirements appear to be reasonable.  Does anyone have any thoughts on that?

I've done some initial checking into what it would require to create a new foreign-owned corporation in the Philippines, because I intend to be fully registered.  One thing I haven't been able to learn much about is what the banking situation is like.  The US has ACH for moving funds in and out of banks.  India has NEFT. etc.  Does a similar situation exist in the Philippines and if so, what is it?  I've been able to see that if you have an account at "BankA" you can move money easily to another account, but I'm not sure whether this is easy between banks.

Any thoughts are appreciated.

Thanks

Thanks John, that clears it up nicely.  Also appreciate the link to the right source page... very helpful.

I don't know who runs the Contoli site, but it is broken.

#1 if you hit "Sign In", you get a warning about the site's certificate.  It's a self-signed certificate, not issued by a trusted cert issuer, so every browser in the world is going to give you an error.

#2, Even if you accept the cert error and proceed, once you get to https://www.cointoli.com/sign-in, you get this 404 error message:

Not Found

The requested URL /sign-in was not found on this server.

So, I'd bet once the site gets fixed you might sell more. I'd be interested, but I think the price of Bitcoin has run up too far to justify a BTC 1.9 price.

I too was worried about potentially getting the "suspicious activity" reason for cancelling a buy order.  I was especially worried because this was my first very large order and the price of Bitcoin had moved up nicely since I had placed the buy.

Bottom line: no issues at all.  No issues with my bank as well (USAA).  Coinbase delivered my coins exactly when they had promised. 

It sounds like you want your users to maintain bitcoin balances on your server and then they'll use these balances to pay for things.

Unless you are very very experienced in computer security and system design, I'd advise against this.  It's only a matter of time before you'll be hacked.

I really don't know why you'd want to do this anyway.  If you sold items  in fiat currency, you wouldn't require users to store fiat currency on your site, would you?  They'd just use credit cards or something.

Please explain further.

Thanks John.

This introduces some questions when optional parameters are not supplied.  I'm sure I'm not fully grasping yet how to deal with these and I'd appreciate any feedback.

Consider the following example:

Suppose I want to get the balance for all accounts in a wallet.  This request works as expected, returning the combined balance from all accounts with a confirmation count of more than 1 (the default):

{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":"1","method":"getbalance","params":[]}

But, suppose I wanted to get a combined balance for the wallet for all accounts with a confirmation count of more than 2?

{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":"1","method":"getbalance","params":[null, 2]} - this fails
{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":"1","method":"getbalance","params":[,2]} - this fails
{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":"1","method":"getbalance","params":[2]} - this fails
{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":"1","method":"getbalance","params":["", 2]} - this succeeds, but it doesn't deliver what we want, because it's really returning the default "" account and not a combined total for all accounts.

I can't figure out any other combinations to supply.  Any pointers appreciated.

I'm doing some work building yet another language-specific wrapper for BitcoinD's JSON-RPC requests.  I'm working from the wiki documentation at https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Original_Bitcoin_client/API_calls_list.

I'm trying to understand the proper and best way to provide both required and optional parameters.

For example, this request body is valid and produces the response that I expect:
{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":"1","method":"gettransaction","params":["315a1e40465591c5cbbbeab3318c57fb1b2cfa21e9f8ad297dcf1bc58d560dcd"]}

However, the parameter in this case is not named.  In this specific method, it's not such of a big deal since there is only one required parameter. But if you look at some of the more complex calls that have multiple parameters such as listreceivedbyaccount or move, sendmany, etc. it would seem that naming parameters would be more important.

By naming parameters, I'm talking about supplying both the parameter name and it's value to the server. 

Something like this, although this *does not work* (so don't use it):
{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":"1","method":"gettransaction","params":[{"txid":"315a1e40465591c5cbbbeab3318c57fb1b2cfa21e9f8ad297dcf1bc58d560dcd"}]}

Have I just got the expected format wrong?  Is there any way to provide the specific parameter name and value to the server to be very specific? Or is it just positional order that is important?

thanks

I've sold coins there, and people do every day.  But the point of your question is not what happened in the past, but what *might* happen in the future.  And that unfortunately no one really nows.

They've taken steps to ensure full registration with any applicable laws and regulations.  But a bank can close an account for any reason, valid or not.