12 ms·

Estonia is planning to launch Estcoin

341 points by madspindel 9y ago

skrebbel 9y ago
This is awesome. I think bitcoin is a bubble and ICOs are mostly scams, but I love love love how fast Estonia's government is able to iterate on stuff like this. Truly an example to governments everywhere.
- thinkMOAR 9y ago
  Indeed, though have to note its a little bit easier applying new things in a country with a population of 1.3 million total
  - gnarbarian 9y ago
    Plus they have far less historical baggage and red tape constricting dramatic decisions like this. (For better and worse)
  - pavlov 9y ago
    In America, the wide independence of states is supposed to work like this: smaller states can experiment while retaining the benefits of access to a large common market. In practice, it's nothing like that. At least I can't imagine Rhode Island introducing a "RhodeCoin" on six months' notice. Are American states suffocated by the federal structure? Maybe, but Estonia is also a member of the EU and the Euro currency, so clearly it doesn't have to be automatically like that. (My personal opinion is that the EU/Euro are actually much more innovation-friendly supranational structures than they're generally given credit for. Estonia's economic growth has much to do with their EU membership.)
    - simias 9y ago
      I'm European but didn't gay marriage and (ongoing) weed legalization basically work like that? First it's individual states and eventually it gets to the federal level. Seems to sort-of work for these issues.
      - teraflop 9y ago
        Sort of, but it doesn't completely work like that in practice, because of how heavily involved the federal government is with all sorts of things. In fact, both of your examples illustrate this. When gay marriage was only legal at the state level, same-sex legally married couples weren't treated as married for the purposes of income tax, Social Security, immigration, and a bunch of other federal benefits. And even in states where marijuana is decriminalized, the DEA can arrest and federally prosecute you if they feel like it.
        nostrademons 9y ago
        Much of the point of having states experiment isn't to get everything right, though, it's to prove that the sky doesn't fall when a new social policy is enacted. Usually whenever any new social contract is proposed, there's an immediate chorus of "this will lead to chaos and anarchy!", and it's only when a policy has been in place for a couple years can people judge whether it really did lead to chaos and anarchy. For both gay marriage and marijuana legalization, for example, certain states tried it against a chorus of voices that said "This will lead to the destruction of marriage as we know it" or "crime will go through the roof". And then that didn't happen, and so other states tried it, and eventually it filters up to the federal level. There have been other cases where policies have been tried that did lead to widespread chaos and negative consequences, like Nebraska's safe-haven law that defined a child as anyone under 18 and led to mother's abandoning their teenagers because they didn't want to deal with them, or California's Prop 8 that was supposed to keep senior citizens in their homes but had the unintended consequence of restricting the supply of housing and driving housing prices through the roof. In these cases, the laws have not been duplicated in other states, at least not without changing the problematic details. There's talk in a few states of introducing both universal health care and net neutrality as state laws. This will be an interesting experiment, and will let us see whether the sky does in fact fall before rolling it out nationwide.
        jmalicki 9y ago
        Prop 13, not 8
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
- ksmsjm 9y ago
  not sure it's whole goverment speaking here. week ago, Head of Payment and Settlement Systems Department of Eesti Pank told that crypto is a ponzi scheme
  - majewsky 9y ago
    > cryptocurrencies FTFY
    - wrinkl3 9y ago
      That's a lost battle. At this stage a lot more people are aware of cryptocurrencies than of the concept of Cryptography, and slang like that always follows the majority consensus.
      - fastball 9y ago
        Everyone I know that refers to cryptocurrencies as "cryptos" are definitely aware that there is more to cryptography than tokens. It absolutely is a battle we can win.
        cvsh 9y ago
        What battles has linguistic prescriptivism ever won?
        ambicapter 9y ago
        literally every single one of them.
        coderdude 9y ago
        Nah. People are dumb. Look at the zero percent of people who know what "beg the question" actually means. Or look at how many people ask if someone can "expand on something". All words and phrases will eventually become something slightly different and dumber.
- criddell 9y ago
  The whole e-Residency program from Estonia is very interesting. How did that particular country end up with a government that seems to be so willing to embrace cryptography related technologies? Wikipedia says Taavi Kotka was a driving force. Does anybody happen to know if he's on HN?
  - JulianRaphael 9y ago
    The seed was planted when Estonia realized that they need a government that can continue to operate even if a foreign power would seize their territory. By now, they realized that a small country can build itself a disproportionately big lever by embracing technology and new concepts of governance. Hence, cryptography is an essential part of their bigger vision. It’s amazing to see Estonia pursue its vision and I for one hope that they’ll become a role model for future governments.
  - linkmotif 9y ago
    Long New Yorker article last week on this subject
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
tom_mellior 9y ago
I love this part: > Estonia’s only currency is the euro and this is an essential feature of our EU membership, which we are proud to have. No one here is interested in changing that. OK, great. Next sentence: > That’s why we have always referred to estcoin as a proposed ‘crypto token’. (top highlight!) Wow, clever! It's not a currency! Oppressive EU regulations (that we agree with and are not interested in changing) have been obeyed. Next sentence: > Governments do need to consider the disruptive impact of how crypto tokens can be used as currency Hahaha. Sorry, but this "we're launching a currency that we don't call a currency but that everybody, including us, knows is meant to be a currency <wink>" is ridiculous. All that said, I think issuing some sort of government-backed currency might be one way of experimenting with implementing a universal basic income, in order to combat poverty among your citizens. But I don't see that discussed in the article.
- microcolonel 9y ago
  It's not just ridiculous, but brilliant. The new German empire is most likely too fragile and legalistic to apply currency regulations to this.
  - tom_mellior 9y ago
    Every definition of the term "legalistic" that I find seems to be something like "intent on upholding the law". So... you're contradicting yourself?
  - johnchristopher 9y ago
    What's the new German empire ? Today's Germany territory or the "Germanic" nations ? (or something else)
    - aluhut 9y ago
      I bet 1 Estcoin that he was saying Europe is being controlled by Germany.
    - Trundle 9y ago
TekMol 9y ago
No technical infos? Will this be a chain on it's own or based on an existing chain?
- pests 9y ago
  Idea phase, not implementation. There are three separate ideas for what estcoin could become.
logronoide 9y ago
Launching a crypto to compete against Euro sounds bizarre for a country that needs to reinforce its European membership against the Russian threat. They need to be as close as possible to the core of the EU. But I really like the idea of a community estcoin to boost the adoption of the e-residence and all the services around. A very interesting side effect of an ICO is how the buyers become instantly in evangelist of the service/solution provided by the company backing the offering. I think the 'community effect' is key for a successful ICO, that's why I like offerings like https://www.tutellus.io https://www.tutellus.io for example.
- Falkens_Maze 9y ago
  > Launching a crypto to compete against Euro sounds bizarre When did they specifically say Estcoin was to be used as a currency? An ICO just requires you to issue a token[1]. [1] https://theethereum.wiki/w/index.php/ERC20_Token_Standard https://theethereum.wiki/w/index.php/ERC20_Token_Standard
  - logronoide 9y ago
    > Much of the criticism of estcoin was based on the fact that Estonia simply can’t start its own cryptocurrency even if it wanted to. Estonia’s only currency is the euro and this is an essential feature of our EU membership, which we are proud to have. No one here is interested in changing that. If you read the first news about estcoin they used the term 'cryptocurrency', now the use 'crypto token'.
    - pests 9y ago
      So they took feedback, made logical changes to their plan based on that feedback... and we should fault them for this?
      - Dylan16807 9y ago
        When the change is more or less just the name, yes.
tzahola 9y ago
A centralized, nationalized cryptocurrency? How revolutional!
unitboolean 9y ago
The problem is that the EU court may force Estonia to any decision they want. This already happend with Ireland - the EU forced them to collect 13 Billions in additional taxes from Apple even if Ireland didn't want to do this.
- RobertoG 9y ago
  Well, corporations go to Ireland because they have low taxes and they are in the common market. I doubt one of those alone would work.
  - tom_mellior 9y ago
    Besides the low taxes, Ireland also has the enormous advantage for foreign corporations of being an English-speaking country.
1ba9115454 9y ago
It doesn't sound like this guy really has the permission of his country to do what he's proposing to do. He appears to be struggling to fit an ICO into his current role. It's simply a bad idea IMHO. A blockchain is not a good fit for an organisation that is cleary centralized. An ICO is a way to raise funding, why does a government department need to do that.
- rando444 9y ago
  There's nothing wrong with a centralized blockchain. The central organization can scale the infrastructure much better than something decentralized, with the end benefit of the blockchain being that the data in it can not be changed like you could if it was just fields in a database.
  - chris_wot 9y ago
    There is literally no point to a “centralised blockchain”.
    - davidgerard 9y ago
      I'm sure we could use a centralised blockchain! it could use a transaction ledger in a Merkle tree, everything made tamper-evident. You could widely distribute copies of the thing, saying what the hash is, so anyone would know this was the good copy. We need a good name for a software product like that ... something like ... Global ... Information ... Technology. Think that'd work?
    - stale2002 9y ago
      A global public database is still useful. It allows everyone to easily verify the chain. The only centralized part would be the issuing. Blockchain is completely different than a decentralized proof of work algorithm, and I am not sure why everyone always confuses the 2.
      - chris_wot 9y ago
slifer 9y ago
e-coin was probably already taken
baxtr 9y ago
I am not sure why, but it reminded me of something that happened to another small European country a while back: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_schemes_in_Albania https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_schemes_in_Albania
_up 9y ago
Has someone founded an Estonian company and offers a subscription service. Stripe is not available. And I want to use EDD for Wordpress and I could not find a plugin for subscriptions with Braintree and I wonder why? I may program it myself but I wonder if there may be a reason nobody has implemented it yet.
- superasn 9y ago
  Yes, desperately waiting for Stripe to come to Estonia. Just got my e-residency but that's my only reason for not taking the next step and incorporating my business there. I guess the market isn't big enough yet for Stripe to open there.
tromp 9y ago
> Everyone’s heard stories about investors losing access to their crypto tokens — perhaps because they forgot their private key for example — but this doesn’t happen to e-residents if their wallets are linked to their government-backed digital identity. How is that supposed to work? You do not fully own crypto tokens unless you and you alone hold the private keys.
- bufferoverflow 9y ago
  It sounds like it's not any different from regular electronic money, but maybe with better APIs.
- mbrock 9y ago
  If you lose your private key as an e-Resident, you go to the embassy to revoke it and get a new one. The state as a root authority is convenient in that sense. You can imagine, for example, that your tokens would be owned by a smart contract controlled by your e-Residency, so that as long as you can present a currently valid e-Residency, you can access the tokens. Presumably you could also transfer those tokens to a non-e-Residency address, and forfeit the convenience of the state identity.
- Strom 9y ago
  It works by associating your tokens with your identity. You're the only one with the private key, however the identity manager (government in this case) decides which public keys are linked to an identity. Of course this also means that the government could seize your coins.
  - krrrh 9y ago
    It would also mean that pseudonymity is out the window. Does anyone else remember when anonymous transactions was the sine qua non of cryptocurrency hype?
- Avamander 9y ago
  Pretty sure they're just saying "Here's our (web-based) wallet where you have to login with your ID card and sign transactions with your ID card". But that's pretty much as secure as a Yubikey assuming the government doesn't fuck up it's cards or their software again.
dcvbnktu 9y ago
No thanks I got burned on auroracoin. Cryptos are global. Heck they could be intergalactic. But they ain't local. Fuck Dux Fuck I'm Fucking Hell Banned
bufferoverflow 9y ago
> Estonia’s only currency is the euro and this is an essential feature of our EU membership That's just false. Eurozone and the EU overlap, but they aren't the same. UK has its pound, Switzerland uses francs.
- Strom 9y ago
  It's not false as it says our EU membership, as opposed to every EU membership.
- freetonik 9y ago
  You're right, but Switzerland is not a member of EU.
  - ptaipale 9y ago
    Yep, previous poster should have said Sweden and Denmark as they use their own currencies. And on the other hand, Kosovo and Montenegro use the euro as currency even though they are not in EU.
  - jaclaz 9y ago
    >You're right, but Switzerland is not a member of EU. ... and UK soon won't be anymore. Denmark is a better example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlargement_of_the_eurozone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlargement_of_the_eurozone And there is of course the "curious" situation of Sweden: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweden_and_the_euro https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweden_and_the_euro
- jrnvs 9y ago
  New countries joining the EU are obliged to adopt the euro once they meet the economic requirements. Only some of the pre-euro members have negotiated an opt-out. Also note that the article doesn’t claim the euro as essential feature for every country’s EU membership, it just says it’s essential for Estonia.
  - ptaipale 9y ago
jaclaz 9y ago
>Since the proposal was published, I’ve been repeatedly asking audiences if they would be interested in purchasing estcoins and the response is a resounding yes, even if they are not always sure why yet. Would it be offensive to hint that maybe -just maybe - audiences were (largely) clueless? >You might be surprised to hear this, but we completely agree with the criticism that estcoin is a solution looking for a problem. However, that is not necessarily a bad thing. Very clever argument, though: >E-Residency was also a solution looking for a problem when the programme was launched. The solution was to enable anyone in the world to apply for an Estonian ID digital ID card and then gain access to our e-services, but even many of the first e-residents were not sure what problems this would solve for them. Three years (and almost 30,000 applications) later, we now have a very good understanding of the problems that e-Residency solves by helping democratise access to entrepreneurship globally and enabling the rise of location-independence. I still completely fail to realize which actual problems were solved by e-residency (setting aside some good money going to Estonia).
- Shoothe 9y ago
  > I still completely fail to realize which actual problems were solved by e-residency (setting aside some good money going to Estonia). It's still not exactly clear what money would go to Estonia. I'm no tax advisor but reading previous threads indicate that even if you incorporate a company in Estonia but solely operate it from another country that has tax treaties with Estonia (and many do) you still need to do your taxes locally, not in Estonia. So except the fee for the card and processing company application there are no big money to be made here.
  - mgiannopoulos 9y ago
    Several Estonian companies have been created to support this. Estonian banks have new clients. Some taxes will eventually be paid one way or the other. All these are better than nothing for Estonia.
  - jononor 9y ago
    You mean for the income tax right? The tax on company profits I would expect to still go to Estonia?
ninguem2 9y ago
That is coming too soon after a major flaw was discovered in the cryptography of their electronic IDs [1], doesn't inspire confidence. [1] http://news.err.ee/616732/potential-security-risk-could-affect-750-000-estonian-id-cards http://news.err.ee/616732/potential-security-risk-could-affe...
fgjjgutjvnu 9y ago
The one thing I don't like is that they take fingerprints when signing up for e-residency. Not that I have anything to hide, but it seems uncalled for, and at odds with saving "privacy data".
asenna 9y ago
I like how Estonia is embracing technology. However while doing my research on how crypto friendly they are, I came across this surprising ruling by the Supreme Court in 2016 against a Bitcoin exchange that was forced to move out: - https://cointelegraph.com/news/owner-moves-bitcoin-exchange-out-of-estonia-after-landmark-supreme-court-decision https://cointelegraph.com/news/owner-moves-bitcoin-exchange-... - https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/4efdam/estonia_now_officially_worst_country_in_eu_for/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/4efdam/estonia_now... Anyone more familiar with the situation have any thoughts on this? This seems contradictory to what they are trying to do.
- scribu 9y ago
  The apparent contradiction can easily be resolved - “We don’t want to allow crypto tokens, unless we control them.” A sort of “We are pro change, as long as things stay the same.”
CPLX 9y ago
As of the current moment at the end of 2017, the prime use case for cryptocurrencies is overwhelmingly as a tool for gambling. It should be obvious and unsurprising to see governments attempt to join the market and take over the most widespread forms of gambling for revenue purposes and to regulate potential fraud. It's the same set of incentives that caused the old mafia-run numbers games to become state lotteries.
- csomar 9y ago
  Completely proofless comment. I could also write the same but just remplace “gambling” with “drugs”
  - krrrh 9y ago
    GP said, “at the end of 2017”. Drugs were the prime use case from 2011 to 2013.
ryanmarsh 9y ago
Oh the irony had they labeled it “e-coin” (reference to Mr. Robot on USA)
baccredited 9y ago
I think Estonia will pull this off and it will be useful. Take a look at their success with e-voting, for example. Is any other country even close to these numbers? 'In the 2015 parliamentary elections, 176,491 people, 30.5% of all participants, voted over the Internet.' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voting_in_Estonia#2015_Elections https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voting_in_Estonia#2...
- foepys 9y ago
  Nobody sane would want e-voting. It has exactly the same problems as voting machines and in addition to that is heavily vulnerable to DDoS attacks and ID theft. Tom Scott on electronic voting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI
- nokcha 9y ago
  >Take a look at their success with e-voting How do you know that it was successful? I'd say that, in order to be successful, an election must ensure that (1) the votes are accurately counted and (2) the voters aren't bribed or coerced w.r.t. their votes. Traditional voting at polling places ensure this by having voters mark their ballots in secret and keeping the paper ballots available for a recount. I don't see how it is possible to provide either ballot accuracy or ballot secrecy if voters can vote on insecure (possibly malware-infected) computers in an uncontrolled physical location (possibly being watched by someone bribing or coercing them to vote a certain way).
diego_moita 9y ago
Pros: * virtual money with monetary policy. This could shield it against manias, panics, bubbles and crashes * Estonia is not big enough to dream of imperialism and hegemony (hopefully). Cons: * scale is everything. If the Financial authorities of the U.S., China, England, Japan, Facebook, Google, WeChat or Tencent implement something like that in a global scale, it will be hard to compete. * Mario Draghi, the "cappo-di-tutti-cappi" in the European Union says no: https://qz.com/1072740/mario-draghi-of-the-ecb-dashes-estonias-plan-for-an-estcoin-cryptocurrency-backed-by-the-government/ https://qz.com/1072740/mario-draghi-of-the-ecb-dashes-estoni...
- zubspace 9y ago
  Can someone enlighten me in what way disparate digital currencies, like EstCoin, UsCoin, SwissCoin, ChinaCoin, etc etc would be an improvement compared to status quo?
  - diego_moita 9y ago
    Trust. It is hard to sell a bread or chewing gum in a coin that you can't be sure will cost 10 times more tomorrow or will be worth nothing. This is why Steam and WrapBootstrap (among many others) gave up on Bitcoin. Most current currencies have this volatility and instability because: a) it is hard for them to technically adapt to scale (e.g: allowing more transactions, changing algorithms,...) b) the supply of money must respond to price oscillations. This is basic monetary policy and is how Central Banks assure that fiat currencies remain stable and reliable (well, at least is what they should do).
    - mastax 9y ago
      So then what does UsCoin get you over USD?
      - diego_moita 9y ago
        I am not American and don't trust the American government to control my money or to keep it away from Putin or Bulgarian criminals, so it gains nothing. But if it was implemented by a reputable government that respects privacy and implements the convenience of most crypto-currencies than I would take it, for sure.
mmartinson 9y ago
This feels like it's straight out of The Corrections. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Corrections https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Corrections (If you haven't read this, stop everything you're doing and go find a copy)
m3kw9 9y ago
So a decentralized system is now centralized?
crimsonalucard 9y ago
Amazing how technology allows people to create value out of thin air.

341 points by madspindel 9y ago

This is awesome. I think bitcoin is a bubble and ICOs are mostly scams, but I love love love how fast Estonia's government is able to iterate on stuff like this. Truly an example to governments everywhere.

thinkMOAR 9y ago
Indeed, though have to note its a little bit easier applying new things in a country with a population of 1.3 million total
- gnarbarian 9y ago
  Plus they have far less historical baggage and red tape constricting dramatic decisions like this. (For better and worse)
- pavlov 9y ago
  In America, the wide independence of states is supposed to work like this: smaller states can experiment while retaining the benefits of access to a large common market. In practice, it's nothing like that. At least I can't imagine Rhode Island introducing a "RhodeCoin" on six months' notice. Are American states suffocated by the federal structure? Maybe, but Estonia is also a member of the EU and the Euro currency, so clearly it doesn't have to be automatically like that. (My personal opinion is that the EU/Euro are actually much more innovation-friendly supranational structures than they're generally given credit for. Estonia's economic growth has much to do with their EU membership.)
  - simias 9y ago
    I'm European but didn't gay marriage and (ongoing) weed legalization basically work like that? First it's individual states and eventually it gets to the federal level. Seems to sort-of work for these issues.
    - teraflop 9y ago
      Sort of, but it doesn't completely work like that in practice, because of how heavily involved the federal government is with all sorts of things. In fact, both of your examples illustrate this. When gay marriage was only legal at the state level, same-sex legally married couples weren't treated as married for the purposes of income tax, Social Security, immigration, and a bunch of other federal benefits. And even in states where marijuana is decriminalized, the DEA can arrest and federally prosecute you if they feel like it.
      - nostrademons 9y ago
        Much of the point of having states experiment isn't to get everything right, though, it's to prove that the sky doesn't fall when a new social policy is enacted. Usually whenever any new social contract is proposed, there's an immediate chorus of "this will lead to chaos and anarchy!", and it's only when a policy has been in place for a couple years can people judge whether it really did lead to chaos and anarchy. For both gay marriage and marijuana legalization, for example, certain states tried it against a chorus of voices that said "This will lead to the destruction of marriage as we know it" or "crime will go through the roof". And then that didn't happen, and so other states tried it, and eventually it filters up to the federal level. There have been other cases where policies have been tried that did lead to widespread chaos and negative consequences, like Nebraska's safe-haven law that defined a child as anyone under 18 and led to mother's abandoning their teenagers because they didn't want to deal with them, or California's Prop 8 that was supposed to keep senior citizens in their homes but had the unintended consequence of restricting the supply of housing and driving housing prices through the roof. In these cases, the laws have not been duplicated in other states, at least not without changing the problematic details. There's talk in a few states of introducing both universal health care and net neutrality as state laws. This will be an interesting experiment, and will let us see whether the sky does in fact fall before rolling it out nationwide.
        jmalicki 9y ago
        Prop 13, not 8
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
ksmsjm 9y ago
not sure it's whole goverment speaking here. week ago, Head of Payment and Settlement Systems Department of Eesti Pank told that crypto is a ponzi scheme
- majewsky 9y ago
  > cryptocurrencies FTFY
  - wrinkl3 9y ago
    That's a lost battle. At this stage a lot more people are aware of cryptocurrencies than of the concept of Cryptography, and slang like that always follows the majority consensus.
    - fastball 9y ago
      Everyone I know that refers to cryptocurrencies as "cryptos" are definitely aware that there is more to cryptography than tokens. It absolutely is a battle we can win.
      - cvsh 9y ago
        What battles has linguistic prescriptivism ever won?
        ambicapter 9y ago
        literally every single one of them.
      - coderdude 9y ago
        Nah. People are dumb. Look at the zero percent of people who know what "beg the question" actually means. Or look at how many people ask if someone can "expand on something". All words and phrases will eventually become something slightly different and dumber.
criddell 9y ago
The whole e-Residency program from Estonia is very interesting. How did that particular country end up with a government that seems to be so willing to embrace cryptography related technologies? Wikipedia says Taavi Kotka was a driving force. Does anybody happen to know if he's on HN?
- JulianRaphael 9y ago
  The seed was planted when Estonia realized that they need a government that can continue to operate even if a foreign power would seize their territory. By now, they realized that a small country can build itself a disproportionately big lever by embracing technology and new concepts of governance. Hence, cryptography is an essential part of their bigger vision. It’s amazing to see Estonia pursue its vision and I for one hope that they’ll become a role model for future governments.
- linkmotif 9y ago
  Long New Yorker article last week on this subject

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

tom_mellior 9y ago

I love this part: > Estonia’s only currency is the euro and this is an essential feature of our EU membership, which we are proud to have. No one here is interested in changing that. OK, great. Next sentence: > That’s why we have always referred to estcoin as a proposed ‘crypto token’. (top highlight!) Wow, clever! It's not a currency! Oppressive EU regulations (that we agree with and are not interested in changing) have been obeyed. Next sentence: > Governments do need to consider the disruptive impact of how crypto tokens can be used as currency Hahaha. Sorry, but this "we're launching a currency that we don't call a currency but that everybody, including us, knows is meant to be a currency <wink>" is ridiculous. All that said, I think issuing some sort of government-backed currency might be one way of experimenting with implementing a universal basic income, in order to combat poverty among your citizens. But I don't see that discussed in the article.

microcolonel 9y ago
It's not just ridiculous, but brilliant. The new German empire is most likely too fragile and legalistic to apply currency regulations to this.
- tom_mellior 9y ago
  Every definition of the term "legalistic" that I find seems to be something like "intent on upholding the law". So... you're contradicting yourself?
- johnchristopher 9y ago
  What's the new German empire ? Today's Germany territory or the "Germanic" nations ? (or something else)
  - aluhut 9y ago
    I bet 1 Estcoin that he was saying Europe is being controlled by Germany.
  - Trundle 9y ago

TekMol 9y ago

No technical infos? Will this be a chain on it's own or based on an existing chain?

pests 9y ago
Idea phase, not implementation. There are three separate ideas for what estcoin could become.

logronoide 9y ago

Launching a crypto to compete against Euro sounds bizarre for a country that needs to reinforce its European membership against the Russian threat. They need to be as close as possible to the core of the EU. But I really like the idea of a community estcoin to boost the adoption of the e-residence and all the services around. A very interesting side effect of an ICO is how the buyers become instantly in evangelist of the service/solution provided by the company backing the offering. I think the 'community effect' is key for a successful ICO, that's why I like offerings like https://www.tutellus.io https://www.tutellus.io for example.

Falkens_Maze 9y ago
> Launching a crypto to compete against Euro sounds bizarre When did they specifically say Estcoin was to be used as a currency? An ICO just requires you to issue a token[1]. [1] https://theethereum.wiki/w/index.php/ERC20_Token_Standard https://theethereum.wiki/w/index.php/ERC20_Token_Standard
- logronoide 9y ago
  > Much of the criticism of estcoin was based on the fact that Estonia simply can’t start its own cryptocurrency even if it wanted to. Estonia’s only currency is the euro and this is an essential feature of our EU membership, which we are proud to have. No one here is interested in changing that. If you read the first news about estcoin they used the term 'cryptocurrency', now the use 'crypto token'.
  - pests 9y ago
    So they took feedback, made logical changes to their plan based on that feedback... and we should fault them for this?
    - Dylan16807 9y ago
      When the change is more or less just the name, yes.

tzahola 9y ago

A centralized, nationalized cryptocurrency? How revolutional!

unitboolean 9y ago

The problem is that the EU court may force Estonia to any decision they want. This already happend with Ireland - the EU forced them to collect 13 Billions in additional taxes from Apple even if Ireland didn't want to do this.

RobertoG 9y ago
Well, corporations go to Ireland because they have low taxes and they are in the common market. I doubt one of those alone would work.
- tom_mellior 9y ago
  Besides the low taxes, Ireland also has the enormous advantage for foreign corporations of being an English-speaking country.

1ba9115454 9y ago

It doesn't sound like this guy really has the permission of his country to do what he's proposing to do. He appears to be struggling to fit an ICO into his current role. It's simply a bad idea IMHO. A blockchain is not a good fit for an organisation that is cleary centralized. An ICO is a way to raise funding, why does a government department need to do that.

rando444 9y ago
There's nothing wrong with a centralized blockchain. The central organization can scale the infrastructure much better than something decentralized, with the end benefit of the blockchain being that the data in it can not be changed like you could if it was just fields in a database.
- chris_wot 9y ago
  There is literally no point to a “centralised blockchain”.
  - davidgerard 9y ago
    I'm sure we could use a centralised blockchain! it could use a transaction ledger in a Merkle tree, everything made tamper-evident. You could widely distribute copies of the thing, saying what the hash is, so anyone would know this was the good copy. We need a good name for a software product like that ... something like ... Global ... Information ... Technology. Think that'd work?
  - stale2002 9y ago
    A global public database is still useful. It allows everyone to easily verify the chain. The only centralized part would be the issuing. Blockchain is completely different than a decentralized proof of work algorithm, and I am not sure why everyone always confuses the 2.
    - chris_wot 9y ago

slifer 9y ago

e-coin was probably already taken

baxtr 9y ago

I am not sure why, but it reminded me of something that happened to another small European country a while back: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_schemes_in_Albania https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_schemes_in_Albania

_up 9y ago

Has someone founded an Estonian company and offers a subscription service. Stripe is not available. And I want to use EDD for Wordpress and I could not find a plugin for subscriptions with Braintree and I wonder why? I may program it myself but I wonder if there may be a reason nobody has implemented it yet.

superasn 9y ago
Yes, desperately waiting for Stripe to come to Estonia. Just got my e-residency but that's my only reason for not taking the next step and incorporating my business there. I guess the market isn't big enough yet for Stripe to open there.

tromp 9y ago

> Everyone’s heard stories about investors losing access to their crypto tokens — perhaps because they forgot their private key for example — but this doesn’t happen to e-residents if their wallets are linked to their government-backed digital identity. How is that supposed to work? You do not fully own crypto tokens unless you and you alone hold the private keys.

bufferoverflow 9y ago
It sounds like it's not any different from regular electronic money, but maybe with better APIs.
mbrock 9y ago
If you lose your private key as an e-Resident, you go to the embassy to revoke it and get a new one. The state as a root authority is convenient in that sense. You can imagine, for example, that your tokens would be owned by a smart contract controlled by your e-Residency, so that as long as you can present a currently valid e-Residency, you can access the tokens. Presumably you could also transfer those tokens to a non-e-Residency address, and forfeit the convenience of the state identity.
Strom 9y ago
It works by associating your tokens with your identity. You're the only one with the private key, however the identity manager (government in this case) decides which public keys are linked to an identity. Of course this also means that the government could seize your coins.
- krrrh 9y ago
  It would also mean that pseudonymity is out the window. Does anyone else remember when anonymous transactions was the sine qua non of cryptocurrency hype?
Avamander 9y ago
Pretty sure they're just saying "Here's our (web-based) wallet where you have to login with your ID card and sign transactions with your ID card". But that's pretty much as secure as a Yubikey assuming the government doesn't fuck up it's cards or their software again.

dcvbnktu 9y ago

No thanks I got burned on auroracoin. Cryptos are global. Heck they could be intergalactic. But they ain't local. Fuck Dux Fuck I'm Fucking Hell Banned

bufferoverflow 9y ago

> Estonia’s only currency is the euro and this is an essential feature of our EU membership That's just false. Eurozone and the EU overlap, but they aren't the same. UK has its pound, Switzerland uses francs.

Strom 9y ago
It's not false as it says our EU membership, as opposed to every EU membership.
freetonik 9y ago
You're right, but Switzerland is not a member of EU.
- ptaipale 9y ago
  Yep, previous poster should have said Sweden and Denmark as they use their own currencies. And on the other hand, Kosovo and Montenegro use the euro as currency even though they are not in EU.
- jaclaz 9y ago
  >You're right, but Switzerland is not a member of EU. ... and UK soon won't be anymore. Denmark is a better example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlargement_of_the_eurozone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlargement_of_the_eurozone And there is of course the "curious" situation of Sweden: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweden_and_the_euro https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweden_and_the_euro
jrnvs 9y ago
New countries joining the EU are obliged to adopt the euro once they meet the economic requirements. Only some of the pre-euro members have negotiated an opt-out. Also note that the article doesn’t claim the euro as essential feature for every country’s EU membership, it just says it’s essential for Estonia.
- ptaipale 9y ago

jaclaz 9y ago

>Since the proposal was published, I’ve been repeatedly asking audiences if they would be interested in purchasing estcoins and the response is a resounding yes, even if they are not always sure why yet. Would it be offensive to hint that maybe -just maybe - audiences were (largely) clueless? >You might be surprised to hear this, but we completely agree with the criticism that estcoin is a solution looking for a problem. However, that is not necessarily a bad thing. Very clever argument, though: >E-Residency was also a solution looking for a problem when the programme was launched. The solution was to enable anyone in the world to apply for an Estonian ID digital ID card and then gain access to our e-services, but even many of the first e-residents were not sure what problems this would solve for them. Three years (and almost 30,000 applications) later, we now have a very good understanding of the problems that e-Residency solves by helping democratise access to entrepreneurship globally and enabling the rise of location-independence. I still completely fail to realize which actual problems were solved by e-residency (setting aside some good money going to Estonia).

Shoothe 9y ago
> I still completely fail to realize which actual problems were solved by e-residency (setting aside some good money going to Estonia). It's still not exactly clear what money would go to Estonia. I'm no tax advisor but reading previous threads indicate that even if you incorporate a company in Estonia but solely operate it from another country that has tax treaties with Estonia (and many do) you still need to do your taxes locally, not in Estonia. So except the fee for the card and processing company application there are no big money to be made here.
- mgiannopoulos 9y ago
  Several Estonian companies have been created to support this. Estonian banks have new clients. Some taxes will eventually be paid one way or the other. All these are better than nothing for Estonia.
- jononor 9y ago
  You mean for the income tax right? The tax on company profits I would expect to still go to Estonia?

ninguem2 9y ago

That is coming too soon after a major flaw was discovered in the cryptography of their electronic IDs [1], doesn't inspire confidence. [1] http://news.err.ee/616732/potential-security-risk-could-affect-750-000-estonian-id-cards http://news.err.ee/616732/potential-security-risk-could-affe...

fgjjgutjvnu 9y ago

The one thing I don't like is that they take fingerprints when signing up for e-residency. Not that I have anything to hide, but it seems uncalled for, and at odds with saving "privacy data".

asenna 9y ago

I like how Estonia is embracing technology. However while doing my research on how crypto friendly they are, I came across this surprising ruling by the Supreme Court in 2016 against a Bitcoin exchange that was forced to move out: - https://cointelegraph.com/news/owner-moves-bitcoin-exchange-out-of-estonia-after-landmark-supreme-court-decision https://cointelegraph.com/news/owner-moves-bitcoin-exchange-... - https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/4efdam/estonia_now_officially_worst_country_in_eu_for/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/4efdam/estonia_now... Anyone more familiar with the situation have any thoughts on this? This seems contradictory to what they are trying to do.

scribu 9y ago
The apparent contradiction can easily be resolved - “We don’t want to allow crypto tokens, unless we control them.” A sort of “We are pro change, as long as things stay the same.”

CPLX 9y ago

As of the current moment at the end of 2017, the prime use case for cryptocurrencies is overwhelmingly as a tool for gambling. It should be obvious and unsurprising to see governments attempt to join the market and take over the most widespread forms of gambling for revenue purposes and to regulate potential fraud. It's the same set of incentives that caused the old mafia-run numbers games to become state lotteries.

csomar 9y ago
Completely proofless comment. I could also write the same but just remplace “gambling” with “drugs”
- krrrh 9y ago
  GP said, “at the end of 2017”. Drugs were the prime use case from 2011 to 2013.

ryanmarsh 9y ago

Oh the irony had they labeled it “e-coin” (reference to Mr. Robot on USA)

baccredited 9y ago

I think Estonia will pull this off and it will be useful. Take a look at their success with e-voting, for example. Is any other country even close to these numbers? 'In the 2015 parliamentary elections, 176,491 people, 30.5% of all participants, voted over the Internet.' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voting_in_Estonia#2015_Elections https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voting_in_Estonia#2...

foepys 9y ago
Nobody sane would want e-voting. It has exactly the same problems as voting machines and in addition to that is heavily vulnerable to DDoS attacks and ID theft. Tom Scott on electronic voting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI
nokcha 9y ago
>Take a look at their success with e-voting How do you know that it was successful? I'd say that, in order to be successful, an election must ensure that (1) the votes are accurately counted and (2) the voters aren't bribed or coerced w.r.t. their votes. Traditional voting at polling places ensure this by having voters mark their ballots in secret and keeping the paper ballots available for a recount. I don't see how it is possible to provide either ballot accuracy or ballot secrecy if voters can vote on insecure (possibly malware-infected) computers in an uncontrolled physical location (possibly being watched by someone bribing or coercing them to vote a certain way).

diego_moita 9y ago

Pros: * virtual money with monetary policy. This could shield it against manias, panics, bubbles and crashes * Estonia is not big enough to dream of imperialism and hegemony (hopefully). Cons: * scale is everything. If the Financial authorities of the U.S., China, England, Japan, Facebook, Google, WeChat or Tencent implement something like that in a global scale, it will be hard to compete. * Mario Draghi, the "cappo-di-tutti-cappi" in the European Union says no: https://qz.com/1072740/mario-draghi-of-the-ecb-dashes-estonias-plan-for-an-estcoin-cryptocurrency-backed-by-the-government/ https://qz.com/1072740/mario-draghi-of-the-ecb-dashes-estoni...

zubspace 9y ago
Can someone enlighten me in what way disparate digital currencies, like EstCoin, UsCoin, SwissCoin, ChinaCoin, etc etc would be an improvement compared to status quo?
- diego_moita 9y ago
  Trust. It is hard to sell a bread or chewing gum in a coin that you can't be sure will cost 10 times more tomorrow or will be worth nothing. This is why Steam and WrapBootstrap (among many others) gave up on Bitcoin. Most current currencies have this volatility and instability because: a) it is hard for them to technically adapt to scale (e.g: allowing more transactions, changing algorithms,...) b) the supply of money must respond to price oscillations. This is basic monetary policy and is how Central Banks assure that fiat currencies remain stable and reliable (well, at least is what they should do).
  - mastax 9y ago
    So then what does UsCoin get you over USD?
    - diego_moita 9y ago
      I am not American and don't trust the American government to control my money or to keep it away from Putin or Bulgarian criminals, so it gains nothing. But if it was implemented by a reputable government that respects privacy and implements the convenience of most crypto-currencies than I would take it, for sure.

mmartinson 9y ago

This feels like it's straight out of The Corrections. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Corrections https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Corrections (If you haven't read this, stop everything you're doing and go find a copy)

m3kw9 9y ago

So a decentralized system is now centralized?

crimsonalucard 9y ago

Amazing how technology allows people to create value out of thin air.