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Comment by skrebbel | Hacker News Reader

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.

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Indeed, though have to note its a little bit easier applying new things in a country with a population of 1.3 million total

Plus they have far less historical baggage and red tape constricting dramatic decisions like this. (For better and worse)

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.)

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.

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.

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.

Prop 13, not 8

Thanks. I looked it up beforehand and was like "Prop 13, not prop 8, not prop 60", and then somehow I wrote prop 8.

Vermont had universal health care and it didn't work for them, a very small (size and population) and highly homogenous state. I doubt any larger market (basically any other state) would be able to make it work given the realities of the American medical system.

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?

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.

Long New Yorker article last week on this subject

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

> cryptocurrencies

FTFY

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.

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.

What battles has linguistic prescriptivism ever won?

literally every single one of them.

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