Thanks Yossi, for the helpful comments and suggestions bout the service as well.
We will try to implement improvements for the site as soon as we can.

Hi all,

We have soft-launched our Local Isracoin service in Israel.
This is a Hebrew website based on HTML5 responsive design, aimed at the non-crypto public who wants to buy/sell ISR using local Fiat for face-to-face trading.
The system is location based and allows the two parties of the trade to communicate and set the terms and location for the trade.
We will most likely get some TV exposure for this and hopefully it will become the #1 go-to place for people in Israel to trade their coins.
This may also affect the online exchanges, as traders will most likely use their bitcoins to buy at an exchange and sell into the local market in Fiat.

There is more to come and we will update soon.

We are very happy to see hashrate has gone up quite a bit these past few days and would like to remind everyone to also put some hashrate into the Isracoin Multipool at http://isrmultipool.info/  (either scrypt or x11)

Also, anyone who wishes to help grow Isracoin the right way, please feel free to get pool operators to open ISR pools (MPOS, P2POOL).
We definitely need more hashrate in the network.

without getting too much into the exchange debate, we tend to agree that the real value of Isracoin should come from its widespread adoption in Israel, both by businesses and individuals. This is what we are working on mostly and it is a process.

As for your examples of supporting startups and such, you should look at our Phase-IV of the Isracoin plan which talks exactly about this. It is planned for further down the line, when the infrastructure and value are there and allow for this to happen.

We appreciate the feedback!

And if you or any other Israeli wish to help locally, please contact us.
(Of course anyone from the international community is more than welcome to help in other ways, to bring awareness to the coin, especially for mining and other types of support)

This is exactly what we are working on. It just takes time, more people, more support and so on.
And we'll say this - we are truly encouraged by the long term perspective most of this community is taking towards Isracoin. It is absolutely great because that is how we see it and how we designed it from day one.

We are certainly not against it and we have tried discussing it with them, voting for it and so on, but it seems most big exchanges these days either expect huge payments to get listed, or they just don't accept new coins.

We have been up for voting on Mintpal for a long time now and on Cryptsy as well. We've done giveaways for voting even.
We've tried talking with Poloniex a few times and they never gave us a straight answer.

We welcome any help from the community on getting into the larger exchanges, be it via public pressure, voting or paid votes.

Thanks Yossi, for the positive outlook.

Of course hindsight is always 20-20 but we believe in iteration and building infrastructure, step by step, learning as we go and improving as we can. You learn best from doing, not from planning.

We are very encouraged from the positive approach and understanding from the community lately and will endeavor to keep moving forward as planned.

The airdrop is for Israeli based businesses only.

As best we know, there aren't other Fiat exchanges with ISR and of course we would love to be in more of them and have tried to make that happen, but it is not easy. Any help from our community on the matter would be most appreciated.

There is no hardware terminal as yet. We would be very interested in CoinKite for example, but we may not yet qualify under all their requirements. Part of our plan further down the line, if and when the value of the coin increases significantly (for argument sake $1/ISR) is to get into coinKite and then give businesses the option to use their 500 ISR to get a coinKite terminal both as a POS and as a local exchange venue to buy Isracoin with Israeli fiat.

We have stated on the registration page that we will release an option that does not require Facebook.
We expect that to take us about 3 weeks or so. perhaps less.
We've also asked a few people who expressed an interest for relatives without facebook etc, about some ideas we have for how to accomplish this and they seemed to respond favorably to it.

We will also try to get to putting together a "yellow pages" of sorts for businesses that have started accepting Isracoin.
Adding that to our Todo list.

So far about 130 businesses have registered and a few dozens have gone through the verification process. We are still working on verifying the other businesses.
This process still needs refining and work and we are also working on assembling a team to deal with it and push it forward.

We'd love to get you on board helping the project! (no PM seems to have arrived in the forum though, so you can reach out via skype Isracoin or email isracoin@isracoin.org)

Anyone who believes they can help Isracoin grow, in Israel or elsewhere, is more than welcome.

Speaking of work...
We expect to release our Local Isracoin system for beta either today/tomorrow most likely.
It will be included in our media efforts as we want to help people trade Isracoin using Israeli Fiat as well.

Probably a good time to state some FACTS:

First off, those "founders" being referred to are a couple of guys, one of which left partly because of personal issues in his life that prevented him from putting any time into the project (to the point where we couldn't even get him on phone calls). The other guy, Amnon, who is most likely the one hiding behind this freshly made user account, did not do practically anything for the project, other than take a few interviews in the media, which is what we needed him for. After he did those, he essentially did mostly nothing (maybe introduce a few people he knew, helped find a tax attorney etc, which was great, yet with all due respect, that is tantamount to almost nothing compared to the insane amount of work other members have put in the past 4 months).

Furthermore, this character also demanded a TON of money be paid to him for his future work and past "work", demanded we put a lot of power in his hands, demanded we sign "napkin" agreements with him and all sorts of other things, while REFUSING to do his work until we did so. This is why our media did not go out, because this guy who was supposed to do it, screwed us over. We are working to rebuild what he has ruined and will make it happen without him.

As for a multisig - we have already implemented brand new code in the 1.7 Alpha wallet that should make it possible to do a broad multisig (as you know, multisigs are now limited to 3 signatures which is very problematic for this kind of project) - This is why there is now a an 8 person Board of Directors to the project and as soon as the new wallet comes out with the multisig code that allows us a broader solution, those directors will be made custodians of the coins. This has been the plan for quite a while now but what some people don't get is the difference between theory and practice. That's why they keep flapping they're yaps, while others actually do WORK.

Meanwhile all this BS doesn't affect the general public who are very interested in the project and we are working on improving out media exposure in order to reach more and more of the general public.

There are several people behind the scenes who normally do not voice off publicly because they concentrate on work, but I imagine they are really starting to get pissed off now so you may hear from them.

Guys, Just an update, while you're battling with trolls, we are inundated with registrations and questions and requests and emails and bugs and so on and so on, hence why we are quiet. several bugs have been fixed and things seem to be going smoothly with the verifications of users. people are very positive about the project and we received some nice press coverage as well and more is expected next week.

We will update more here as soon as we can come up for some air

FYI - Updates about the opening of Phase-II (which is happening right now) will be provided either in a few hours or later tonight both on the bitcointalk thread as well as the English version of the site.

The Isracoin Staggered Release Model (ISRM) was created to allow for a smooth distribution of coins to recipients nation-wide in a way that benefits both the developing Isracoin economic network and the market it relies on for stability and buying power.

Rationale:

The process of distributing Isracoins to the Israeli public – the “Airdrop” – is set to begin soon. This will lead to a significant increase in the existing supply of available coins. As we’ve seen and learned from previous national-coin airdrops, this can put a strain on the ecosystem of the coin. It is a case of the Tragedy of the Commons, as this move often immediately crashes the market value, with receivers rushing to sell their coins before everyone else does, and the market, anticipating this move, panics and sells as well.
The ISRM aims to solve this problem by distributing the coins over a long period of time and by limiting the daily released amount to correspond with mining rewards. By staggering the release so, we aim to increase the value of the Isracoin network without jeopardizing the Isracoin market. Metcalf’s Law suggests that the value of such a network grows in a polynomial manner, meaning that it is proportional to the number of its participants squared. As each participant – Israeli citizen – receives only a portion of his coins each week, using them to participate in the rapidly growing Isracoin network becomes a more lucrative choice than simply selling them on the market.

The Model:

• The distribution will proceed in four phases, each lasting 4 months, with the last continuing until every eligible person has received his coins.
• Each phase will be marked by a “mining multiple” – a maximum amount of coins that can be distributed daily, tied to the Isracoin daily total mining reward. This increase in available supply provides less coins to more people than mining does, also putting them directly in their smartphones, ready for use.
• The mining multiple will increase with each phase. With the launch of additional projects for the maintenance and growth of the network, it will be able to sustain more concurrent receivers.
• Each person will receive 10 coins every week for 3 months for a total of 100 coins. The amount of people receiving coins concurrently is capped by the maximum amount of coins as determined by the mining multiple.
• Note: the mining multiple sets a cap – the maximum amount of coins that may be distributed each day. We predict that this number will not be reached frequently.

The Numbers:

Phase Duration: 4 months
Current Daily Total Isracoin Mining Reward: 72,000 coins
Mining Multiple for phases 1 - 4: x4, x7, x10, x10
Daily Maximum Distributed Reward (Daily Mining * Multiple): 288,000, 504,000, 720,000, 720,000 coins
Weekly Maximum Amount of Reward Recipients: 201,600, 352,800, 504,000 people


A look to the Future...

The Isracoin national coin allocation will proceed slowly and in a staggered manner, putting coins in the hands of more people than allocation by way of mining. This will greatly increase the amount of users and the actual value of the network while significantly increasing market stability.
We invite everyone who has been participating and following Isracoin to get more involved and take part in making history.

Quick update:

The Local Isracoin system is pretty much ready and is now in testing by a few people in Israel.
(This is Hebrew only for now. perhaps later we will add an English version for people outside Israel).

We are doing final touches on the PhaseII distribution system, testing etc.

Things are on schedule and expected to release on time.

Hi All,

We've already said that we have a ton of work on finishing Phase-II which is due in 9 days and alongside that we are working on the Local Isracoin system which is supposed to launch in tandem with it so you can imagine there's just a lot that's going on.
Meanwhile we are also trying to expand the coin leadership team to include some more veteran business people, crypto people and possibly even someone from the public sector in Israel.

On top of it all we have already managed to get an Isracoin 1.7 Alpha codebase going and will most likely release binaries for it in a few days for testing (definitely not for production use yet). A beta and full release will most likely happen within 2-3 weeks or so.
This 1.7 is of course a switch to the Bitcoin Core 0.9 codebase which is a huge improvement in code and functionality (to be clear - this is NOT a fork of any kind).

The multipool is still in Alpha and the guys there are doing the best they can to improve it and it would help a lot if more hashrate was put into it.

And finally, it is up to each and every one of you to consider yourselves part of this "startup" which essentially has already gone public and you hold "shares" of it. That is the best analogy because if you only think of it as a short-term instrument, you will not gain anything. If you consider this a long term investment you will come to the realization that you are every bit as part of its potential success as every one of us. Some other people are dumping coins (multipools etc) and lowering the value, others stop mining, exchanges snub because they are only interested in hyped-up bs and so on. It is up to each and every one of you to support the coin because every bit counts. We may be doing the heavy lifting but there is a lot that each of you can do to make a difference.
Be more vocal, mine more, invest more, get people interested, post not just here but anywhere else you can. More exposure means more interest in the coin. You all know what Isracoin is all about so go and spread the word.

Quick update -

We have made some good progress on the Local Isracoin service and it is very likely to launch in tandem with Phase-II.

What does this mean for you, the miner/investor?
That most people looking to sell airdrop coins will have a direct, face-2-face outlet in local Israeli fiat to sell/buy the coins and therefor the potential for flooding of the exchanges will diminish significantly.

Also, in case you missed it, an ISR Multipool is out for Alpha testing and if you are a miner, you should strongly consider diverting some of your hashrate into it. (Current supported Algos - Scrypt, X11 - and more coming)
http://isrmultipool.info