Estonia wants to become a 'country as a service' (opens in new tab)

Estonia is such an interesting country. Story is that after the fall of communism they built, their entire economic model off of Milton Friedman's "Free to Choose" book, having relatively little knowledge of any economics. This lead to some very interesting successes as a post-communist nation, especially considering Free to Choose was likely a banned book just a few years before. It sounds like they are going even further to the right and experimenting with some of the ideas from Anarcho-capitalism.

Bully for them. It's been working for them in the past, and it's nice to see a government that (at least seems) to have their act together trying out some weird and out there stuff.

Seems like it'll be a non-starter for most sane businesses given the insane reporting requirements.

we started to ask companies to give us more data. The reason is we wanted to get rid of fraud. Currently, all the companies in Estonia are declaring their B2B deals. If I’m a company and you’re a company and I buy something off you and it’s more than €1,000, we both have to declare it

From https://e-estonia.com/e-residents/about/

e-Residency does not confer citizenship, tax residency, residence or right of entry to Estonia or to the European Union. The e-Resident smart ID card is not a physical identification or a travel document, and does not display a photo.

Imagine this becoming a thing. Where anyone could eventually become Estonia's resident with all the rights (and of course responsibilities) equal to the people actually living there. Once other nations would follow, then the borders would truly start to disappear because it wouldn't really matter where you are located. No more us and them, just people of the earth.

I know it's way too optimistic and this solution probably introduces just as many problems as it solves, but still, one is allowed to dream, right?

Did businessinsider just run an article about what was an april fools joke?

http://arcticstartup.com/article/estonian-country-as-a-servi...

https://countryos.com/

Estonia's E-Residency program has gotten a few mentions on HN before, at one point they actually replied to some of the comments here on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9537551

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10407604

And Kaspar Korjus, director of the E-Residency program, gave an AMA over on the Digital Nomad forum a few months ago:

https://nomadforum.io/t/i-m-kaspar-director-of-estonia-s-e-r...

Interesting, though physical residency must come in at some point, otherwise who pays taxes for the country you actually live in? But hey, if they start making good laws, I'd move there, as European it's very easy. But good laws means also lower taxes and a decent healthcare at decent prices.

Given the long history of flags of convenience and purchasable citizenship in tax havens, something like this seems bound to be attempted eventually. If it takes off, it'll be curious to see how hard the pushback is.

Not too many in silicon valley can claim that:

... He adds: "I have been like a kid in a candy store. I have lots of investment money and full political support."