I am Estonian and what Diamandis writes is not reality, but marketing talk.
In fact, Estonian e-residency is dead. Killed by ALM and KYC rules. Estonian banks are closing accounts of existing e-residents and not opening new ones. Government still tries to promote it a bit, but enthusiasm is dying.
Attitudes and regulations about cross-border finance have changed in recent years and killed e -residency.
If the challenge with implementing your idea is that the incumbents don’t like it and try to regulate it out of existence, then it’s probably a good idea.
Has fraud and crime diminished since AML and KYC were introduced?
It is amazing to me that USG rule of global banking is largely unchallenged. Even in the US after the completely inappropriate release of “suspicious activity reports” by “whistleblowers” there does not seem to be much opposition.
To be clear, KYC and ALM rules what have killed Estonian e-residen y did not orginitate from Estonia. Global trend, political emphasis, much more forced in recent years.
My plan was to ‘e exit’ to ‘e Estonia’ and renounce my California citizen ship, becoming the more favored California legal illegal immigrant. I would vote twice, once in California and once by ‘e vote’ in Estonia.
Coincidentally, the Wall Street Journal just had an article reporting a fairly significant money-laundering running through a branch of a bank in Estonia–something on the order of $200 billion.
The major problem with any mechanism that lets good people evade government control for good reasons, is that it lets bad people evade government control for bad reasons. And criminals (or other states up to no good) usually have much greater incentives to do so.
There is no good way around this problem without some kind of magic filter reliably screening out those people and uses. That’s both really, really hard to do without state-level capacity and coercion, and even trying just creates an enormous incentive for bad actors to try and get around the filters.
A question for libertarian intellectuals is what to do about this problem if one rejects domain-based anarchy or neutralization of the capacity to police, and concedes a legitimate state / public interest in detecting and deterring such criminal activity.