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Become Estonia’s e-resident

e-estonia.com

81–90 of 129 posts

Re: Become Estonia’s e-resident

#81
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You will have to be very very careful about making Estonia the real physical center of the commercial activities deployed by your company. If you don't - let's say you're Dutch, living in Holland and consulting mostly for Dutch clients, then forget it. But let's say you're Dutch, you have a girlfriend in Estonia, you work from there a week every month, and you have clients in several EU countries, with NL only one of…

Can you elaborate on why exactly that would be a problem?

I'm not sure if this applies to Holland, but generally countries with high taxes implement Controlled Foreign Corporation (CFC) laws which force you to pay local taxes even if company is registered offshore.

Whether a company is considered to be CFC depends on many factors such as double taxation treaties between the two countries, the amount of shares you own and the level of taxation in the offshore country.

Re: Become Estonia’s e-resident

#82
post #43
post #37

What are the differences between residency and e-residency? E.g. they won't allow me to vote, will they? What else?

Even (physical) residence will not allow you to vote, only citizenship will. From the site: "This [e-residency] will not entail full legal residency or citizenship or right of entry to Estonia."

Yeah, only EU citizenship along with residency allows one to vote.

Re: Become Estonia’s e-resident

#83
post #79
post #11

I was in Estonia two days ago. I just passed through on a whim as part of a European bicycle tour. I am embarrassed to admit, I knew very little about the country before being there. I was only there a week, so my impressions are addmittedly naive, but very positive. There was a lot of technology forward thinking - online voting, constitutional right to internet access, co-working spaces catering to young entrepreneu…

I've never been there, but from what I understand, they love folk music, and kids learn to program in primary school. Sounds like a wonderful country. Also the home of Skype. Not to be underestimated.

There are a few startups that have been started by Skype alumni in Estonia. Transferwise as mentioned above is one. Another is https://lingvist.io. Another which is dual homed in Estonia and Palo Alto is http://teleport.org.

I went to Tallinn for the first time in 2002 before it was part of the EU. I took the ferry from Helsinki and spent the day walking around the old town. Quite enjoyable. Two things that really stood out were - internet cafes were readily available and extremely cheap (under $2/hour from what I recall) and the beer was cheap :)

I have since been there a handful of times while I was at Skype - unfortunately I never did make it outside of Tallinn.

Edit - I forgot, I caught a rather fun Folk-metal band on Eurovision when I was visiting once. Metsatoll - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dC3Q9q4cRZA

Re: Become Estonia’s e-resident

#84
Most of the team of my startup SaleMove is in Tartu! This is yet another example of how great Estonia is for tech. If you want to develop for a great startup there reach out on our website!

Re: Become Estonia’s e-resident

#85
post #82
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even (physical) residence will not allow you to vote, only citizenship will. From the site: "This [e-residency] will not entail full legal residency or citizenship or right of entry to Estonia."

Yeah, only EU citizenship along with residency allows one to vote.

Ah, I mixed the two. The fact that English is non-native language for me, didn't help, either. What is (e-)residency good for, then?

For anyone Russian reading this: should residency be прописка? It actually was canceled in favor of registration. So, I guess, residency is registration?

Re: Become Estonia’s e-resident

#86
Is there any reason why I - being perfectly happy with my American citizenship and residency and having zero intent to change either - should avoid getting one for the novelty of it? I mean, is there any possible downside to getting this thing out of a sci-fi novel?

Re: Become Estonia’s e-resident

#87

why isn't this an HTTPS site?

Why should each marketing site be HTTPS?

because (although incorrect) some people consider email addresses to be semi-confidential, and one could profit from the automated scraping of addresses from a router that sees a lot of public traffic.

Re: Become Estonia’s e-resident

#89
This is something that has been used in many countries already.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_identity_card

Maybe the main difference is that they will issue it also to non-residents.

By the way, I don't know in other countries but in Spain it was a complete failure due to a really bad implementation: only worked with Internet Explorer, reader with proprietary drivers, etc...

Re: Become Estonia’s e-resident

#90

Is there any reason why I - being perfectly happy with my American citizenship and residency and having zero intent to change either - should avoid getting one for the novelty of it? I mean, is there any possible downside to getting this thing out of a sci-fi novel?

There are only some minor downsides to acquiring a second citizenship of a decent country. (Watch out for American residency though, the taxes can be bad.)

I don't think there are any downsides to the e-residency, apart from having to give some of your data (and a modest fee) to Estonia.

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