Bitcoin in Israel, Part 4: Community and Startups
The Bitcoin community in Israel has made considerable waves over the past year. A meetup group that, one year ago, had less than twenty people attending every month, now has over sixty people attending every two weeks, with a record of over three hundred in April. The Israeli Bitcoin Facebook group recently grew to over 800 members, an impressive amount....
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According to mathematician Meni Rosenfeld, Israel is a Bitcoin “forerunner.” With large numbers of users in the country, the number of startups and merchants continues to grow. Rosenfeld says: Among the list of Israel-based startups, Bits of Gold — in which Rosenfeld is an investor — GetGems and Polycoin lead adoption. “I think the Bitcoin community in Israel is more coherent than in many other places in the world, which can be attributed to the small size of the country. Everyone is in driving distance from anyone else, so its much easier to breed communities that actually meet up and....
The number of fintech and cryptocurrency startups in Israel have increased in the past few years, strengthing the country's position in the sector. Israel has been one of the fastest growing startup hubs for a while, now the country is also making a place for itself in the financial technology map. The majority of startups in the Israeli startup ecosystem are now focused on fintech and blockchain technology. According to reports, the number of startups in the fintech sector has increased fourfold from 90 to 430 within a span of 7 years. The cryptocurrency industry has already seen a....
Although it has faded somewhat from the press in recent months, Israel remains one of the major hubs of the Bitcoin community worldwide. The country may only have a population of 8 million, but its technological and financial center, Tel Aviv, is home to three Bitcoin-accepting restaurants and a rapidly growing number of startups, and is arguably the birthplace of a Bitcoin technology that has seen a considerable amount of attention in the past few weeks: colored coins. The theoretical background behind the idea was developed with the help of Meni Rosenfeld, an Israeli mathematician who....
In the last part of this series, we talked about the state of Bitcoin in Israel and the efforts of Israeli Bitcoin community organizers Meni Rosenfeld and Ron Gross in running the Israeli meetup group. Here, we talk about the next stage in the Israeli Bitcoin community's growth: the effort to set up an Israeli Bitcoin Association. National Bitcoin organizations have been a popular subject lately, with the Bitcoin Alliance of Canada soon to announce its official launch and similar organizations in other countries now picking up worldwide. But what is the benefit of having a national Bitcoin....
The Israel Tax Department has drafted new cryptocurrency tax rules that consider Bitcoin as an asset, eligible for capital gains taxes. The cryptocurrency community in Israel now has some clarity about the legal status of Bitcoin in their country. The country’s tax authorities have recently announced that Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies will be considered as assets and are taxable. The legal status of Bitcoin has always been a grey area in many countries across the world. But with the Israeli authorities clarifying their stance over the cryptocurrency, people can now manage their tax....