I am sure most of us know that Estonia was one of the first countries to embrace Blockchain technology to a larger extend than any other country. They are now looking to upgrade the security infrastructure to the next level.
There has been a of talk around Estonia being The most advanced digital society in the world. They have actually been named this by Wired. I just love this as I thoroughly believe that Estonia might be the preview of the future of the world as described in a fortune.com article. There is also a very nice video with the history of the country and how they became a tech powerhouse by reinventing themselves using blockchain technology.
Did you know: A group of friends from Estonia built the Skype technology and sold it to Microsoft for US$8.5 Billion
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Bordering Russia, Estonia is the smallest of the former Russian soviet states
I found this part of an article from an article I was reading very interesting.
Given Estonia’s history, the invention of Skype in this country was ironic. While Americans were buying their first cell phones, about a quarter-century ago, Estonians were shut off from the world as an outpost of the Soviet Union. You could easily wait 10 years to be assigned a landline phone. By the time the Soviet Union imploded in 1991, the country was in a time warp. “We did not have anything,” says Gen. Riho Terras, the commander of Estonia’s armed forces, who had been a student activist at the time. The country had to reboot from zero. Terras says each citizen was given the equivalent of 10 euros, or $10.60. “That was it,” he says, laughing. “We started from 10 euros each.”
In South Africa where I live, we are issued an ID Document which contains a 13 identity number digits. This is really an issue as it is a book which sometimes gets lost and then it takes hours queuing to get this re-issued and then literally weeks and months to receive the book. In Estonia each person is issued an 11 digit Hash code at birth. This number is created by their Blockchain Technology and is used by every aspect of life in future. This is basically a New Technology World version of the social security number. These guys is just in a different class when it comes to technology.
Did you know: This country is just amazing when it comes to forward thinking. They have already in 2000 declare internet access as a basic human right.
Voting system
The Estonian Voting System has been around since the first online voting was done way back in 2005. They are now looking to upgrade the security aspects of the system , to include end-to-end verifiability as this is the holy grail of any voting systems. You can read the article World's most high-tech voting system to get hacking defenses
Congratulations to Estonia, for being so forward thinking. I am sure you went through some teething problems, but in my opinion you are one of the world's leading technology powerhouses. A lot of countries can learn from you. Anybody from Estonia on the platform? I will love to have a chat about how life really is over there.
Happy Steeming!
