很多人在地图上找不到这个弹丸小国，但它可能在引领世界科技的未来

春日一个午后，我坐在爱沙尼亚首都塔林市郊的办公室里看着窗外散步的人们，突然一个装着轮子的奶油色塑料容器出现在街角，在行人间穿梭。看起来像个儿童玩具，但实际上是个名叫Starship的高科技送货机器人，也有可能成为这座欧洲北部弹丸小国出产的另一款高利润发明——谁能想到如今的爱沙尼亚会成为高科技的摇篮呢。“如果看时间背景设在未来20年以后的科幻电影就会发现，没人会抱着杂货回家。机器人会送货上门，” Starship科技公司联合创始人兼首席执行官阿迪·赫恩拉表示。他说，现实世界已经追上了科幻电影。“大概两年前我们发现这部分未来已经可以实现。”

如果想体验下未来人类如何生活，估计地球上最好的地方就是这座40万人口的美丽古城，中世纪小道在城中蜿蜒，与数字化的现代社会形成鲜明对比。用赫恩拉的话说，现在就开始创造未来，这正是爱沙尼亚积极推动的项目，而且日渐成为发展的核心。

大部分美国人，甚至很多欧洲人都很难从地图上找到爱沙尼亚这个小国，挤在同样临波罗的海的小国拉脱维亚和庞大的俄罗斯中间。人口只有130万，跟达拉斯或纽约布朗克斯区人口差不多。但国土面积小又地处偏远掩盖了其非凡的实力。正是在此，赫恩拉跟一群朋友发明了互联网上极受欢迎的电话平台Skype。

但从爱沙尼亚的历史来看，Skype的发明其实有些讽刺。大约25年前，美国人还在纷纷选购第一部手机时，爱沙尼亚作为前苏联的前哨站与外部世界隔离。想装部固定电话等上10年很正常。随着1991年前苏联解体，整个国家仿佛经历了时间扭曲。“当时真是一穷二白，” 爱沙尼亚国防军司令里霍·德拉斯将军表示，当时他曾是学生积极分子。全国只能从零开始。德拉斯说当时每位市民分到了约10欧元的货币，合10.60美元。“就那么些，”他边说边笑。“我们就是从10欧元起家的。”

一代人过去了，爱沙尼亚仿佛经历了另一种时间扭曲：变成生活高度数字化发展的典范。对于外界人来说，看爱沙尼亚就能了解国家放弃原有系统，选择完全转向在线化会怎样。这一切并非幻想。全世界的政府，包括新加坡、日本和印度等都在考虑采用各种方式转型为数字实体，以削减成本并精简服务（对某些国家来说则可以更密切地监视民众）。爱沙尼亚表示在线系统每年将GDP增长提升2%。

On a Spring afternoon, I’m gazing out the window of an ¬office building on the outskirts of Estonia’s capital, ¬Tallinn, watching people stroll below, when a cream--colored plastic container mounted on black wheels rounds the corner and begins maneuvering its way among the pedestrians. The device looks like a kid’s toy. But in reality it’s a high-tech delivery robot called Starship and potentially the next mega-profitable invention to spring from this snowy, miniature country on the northern edge of Europe—one of the more unexpected launching pads on the planet. “If you look at sci-fi movies set 20 years from now, you don’t see people carrying their groceries. Robots just arrive at their homes,” says Ahti Heinla, cofounder and CEO of Starship Technologies. Reality, he says, has caught up to sci-fi. “About two years ago we realized it was possible to create this part of the future right now.”

For a snapshot of how we might all be living tomorrow, there are few better places to visit than this picturesque city of 400,000, whose winding medieval alleyways offer an elegant contrast to its digital present. Creating the future now, as Heinla puts it, is Estonia’s driving project, and increasingly it is its core business too.

Most Americans or even Europeans would be unable to find this pinprick on a map, squeezed between its small Baltic Sea neighbor Latvia and mammoth Russia. Its population, just 1.3 million, is about the same as Dallas or the Bronx borough of New York City. But its ¬modest size and remoteness belies its clout. It is here that a group of friends, including Heinla, invented the hugely popular Internet calling platform Skype.

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.”

One generation on, Estonia is a time warp of another kind: a fast-forward example of extreme digital living. For the rest of us, Estonia ¬offers a glimpse into what happens when a country abandons old analog systems and opts to run completely online instead. That notion is not fanciful. In various forms, governments across the world, including those in Singapore, Japan, and India, are trying to determine how dramatically they can transform themselves into digital entities in order to cut budgets and streamline services (and for some, keep closer tabs on citizens). Estonia claims its online systems add 2% a year to its GDP.

我在塔林刚一落地，手机就连上了城市免费无线网，15年前无线网就实现全面覆盖。但普通爱沙尼亚人的高度数字化生活体现在各种细节。出生时每个人都会获得自己的11位数字代码，从出生起就会影响生活的方方面面，这就是21世纪的社会保障号码。爱沙尼亚人的数字习惯从小就养成了：孩子们在学校就开始学编程，很多从幼儿园就开始学习。

2000年，爱沙尼亚是全球第一个宣称互联网是基本人权的国家，互联网的地位跟食物和庇护差不多。当年爱沙尼亚还通过一项法案，宣布数字签名与手写签名具备同样效力。由此开启了完全无纸化系统。由于不需要用笔签名，申报税务、银行开户、申请贷款、提取处方和生活中绝大部分事务都不需要纸质文件，不过结婚和离婚除外。“我没到20分钟就成立了公司，哪都没跑，” 41岁的Funderbeam公司首席执行官Kaidi Ruusalepp表示。她于2013年创立了Funderbeam，为早期非上市类型的创业公司提供投资交易平台。“我们从来没去过税务局，也没去过社保机构，等等，”她表示。“所有都可以在网上完成。”

The moment I land in Tallinn, my phone pings with the city’s free Wi-Fi network, which rolled out more than 15 years ago. But the extreme-digital life of regular Estonians is far less visible. At birth, every person is assigned a unique string of 11 digits, a digital identifier that from then on is key to operating almost every aspect of that person’s life—the 21st-century version of a Social Security number. The all-digital habits begin young: Estonian children learn computer programming at school, many beginning in kindergarten.

In 2000, Estonia became the first country in the world to declare Internet access a basic human right—much like food and shelter. That same year it passed a law giving digital signatures equal weight to handwritten ones. That single move created an entire paperless system. Since no one was required to sign with a pen, there was no need for paper documents to pay taxes, open a bank account, obtain a mortgage, pick up a prescription, or perform most of life’s other tasks, other than marrying and divorcing. “I established my company in about 20 minutes, without going anywhere,” says Kaidi Ruusalepp, 41, CEO of Funderbeam, an investment trading platform for early-stage, non-IPO startups, which she founded in 2013. “We never visited the tax board, the Social Security agency, anything,” she says. “Everything is online.”

爱沙尼亚的税务系统也一样。几乎所有的爱沙尼亚人都在线申报，几分钟就能完成。由于所有公众登记汇入同一个系统，爱沙尼亚人可以登入预先准备好的税务申报系统，其中会显示收入、资产、有几个孩子等等。他们根据实际情况稍微调整就可以点击发送。（除了美国，这种方式在很多国家应用得日渐广泛。）去年，时任总理于里·拉塔斯在《每日秀》上向主持人特雷弗·诺阿介绍，在卢森堡机场的闲暇时间用iPad完成了税务申报，赢得广泛赞誉。

我去爱沙尼亚政府访问37岁的拉塔斯时发现，基本找不到纸。他说当总理的三年里唯一一次用墨水笔签名是在婚礼留言簿上。理论上政府可以在线下令让军队进入战争状态。“我从没签署过实体的法律，”他表示，“一部都没有。”

2005年，爱沙尼亚也成为第一个大选在线投票的国家。我问现任爱沙尼亚总统克尔斯季·卡柳莱德去年11月她在哪投的票，她回答得有些不屑，仿佛我问了个特别傻的问题：“用的家里电脑。”卡柳莱德回答时，我们正在塔林开往邻国芬兰赫尔辛基的船上。当时她刚与芬兰签署协议，两国可以互认电子身份证。举个例子，现在芬兰人和爱沙尼亚人在两国任意一处看医生时，都可以自动调取电子病历——反正都存在网上。“我们用电子身份证已经17年了，”她表示。“人们已经学会信任系统。”

现在爱沙尼亚人可能会觉得发达的科技理所当然，但前苏联刚解体时整个国家经济还是崩溃状态。唯一的优势就是从零开始。“当时人们只认得现金，” Guardtime公司总裁，41岁的马丁·路贝尔坐在塔林办公室里表示，公司办公室之前曾是军队的兵营。Guardtime是创立十年的软件安全公司，负责开发全国的区块链系统（稍后详细介绍）。由于爱沙尼亚人从来没用过支票簿，所以前苏联解体后整个国家跳过了纸和笔，直接发银行卡。其实这样很省钱，而且产生了另一个效果：爱沙尼亚人迅速学会上网。

So, too, are Estonians’ taxes. Almost all Estonians file taxes online—within minutes. Since public registries are all linked in one system, Estonians can log in to prefilled tax declarations showing their income, property, number of children, and so on. They make necessary tweaks and hit the send button. (Outside the U.S., this type of approach is increasingly common.) Last year then–Prime Minister Taavi Rõivas earned loud cheers on The Daily Show when he described to host Trevor Noah how he had filed his taxes on his iPad during a few idle minutes in the Luxembourg Airport.

When I visit Rõivas, 37, in his office in the Estonian Parliament, it’s weirdly devoid of paper. He says during nearly three years as Prime Minister the only time he signed his name in ink was in ceremonial guest books. Theoretically, he says, the government could issue an online order to send troops into battle. “I never signed any law physically,” he says. “Never.”

Estonians were also first to be able to vote online in elections, back in 2005. When I ask Estonian President Kersti Kaljulaid where she voted in last November’s elections, which brought her to power, she responds as if my question is dumb: “From my computer at home.” Kaljulaid was ¬speaking to me while we were on a boat to Tallinn from Helsinki, in neighboring Finland, where she had just signed a deal allowing the countries to recognize each other’s digital ID cards. Now, for example, Finns and Estonians can visit doctors in the other country and automatically call up their medical records—all stored online. “We have been using digital identifiers for 17 years,” she says. “People have learned to trust the system.”

Estonians might take all this tech wizardry for granted now, but the country was on its knees economically after the Soviet collapse. It had one huge advantage: It was starting from scratch. “People were paid in cash,” says Martin Ruubel, 41, president of Guardtime, a 10-year-old software security company that developed the country’s blockchain system (more on that in a moment), sitting in his Tallinn office on the grounds of a converted former military barrack. Since no Estonian had ever had a checkbook, once the Soviets were gone the country simply skipped past pen and paper and issued bank cards. It was a money saver, but had another benefit: It pushed Estonians to get online fast.

新任领导人年轻又缺乏经验，但个个励精图治，迅速完成通信产业私有化。“真的很成功，”前苏联解体后第一任总理是时年32岁的马尔特·拉尔，如今57岁的拉尔担任爱沙尼亚银行监管委员会主席。由于很少家庭有固定电话，很多人直接买手提电话。历史学家拉尔表示，他对电脑一窍不通，但相信应该从最时兴的技术开始发展。芬兰表示要向穷邻居免费捐赠模拟电话交换机时，爱沙尼亚拒绝了。

爱沙尼亚政府任命如今Funderbeam的首席执行官Ruusalepp担任全国首位IT律师，当时她只有20岁，还是个学生。“当时我没获得法律学会，也不懂技术，”她表示。她第一个任务就是为电子签名起草法案，比很多国家都早。“我们希望改变国家。我们有脑子，只是需要行动起来，”她表示。

早期的决策为今日爱沙尼亚科技的繁荣奠定了基础。2003年，Skype在塔林出现，激发了一代科技从业人士和创业者。“人们都在想，如果那几个家伙就能做出Skype，我也可以，” 塔林一家风投基金Terra的安德勒斯·奥卡斯表示。2011年微软斥资85亿美元收购Skype时，此前任职Skype的员工向塔林一些新创业公司投了很多钱，进一步吸引了美国资本。Skype的创始开发人员，包括Starship的赫恩拉一起成立了风险投资基金，叫Ambient Sound。“Skype产生的效应巨大，”赫恩拉表示，后来他与Skype联合创始人雅努斯·弗里斯共同创立了Starship，主要投资者包括戴姆勒公司，还有硅谷公司夏斯塔创投和经纬创投等。

如今如果在加州红木城或华盛顿特区用DoorDash或Postmates点一份中餐外卖，很可能就会遇到Starship的测试，手机上叮得一响，就知道送餐机器人到门口了。Starship同时也在瑞士伯尔尼和英国伦敦测试，达美乐披萨很快会测试用Starship在德国汉堡送货。

Skype引发的创业热潮还不只这些。2011年，Skype第一位员工Taavet Hinrikus联合创立了在线转账公司TransferWise，如今在塔林一座大楼里占了四层，每个月处理全球约10亿美元的交易。投资方包括安德森霍洛维茨基金和彼得·泰尔的Valar创投。

Scrambling to piece together a country, the new leaders, young and inexperienced, also rapidly privatized the telecom industry. “It was highly successful,” says Mart Laar, 57, who became the first post-Soviet Prime Minister, at age 32, and is now chairman of the board of supervisors for the Bank of Estonia. Since so few people had even landline phones, many simply bought mobile handsets instead. Laar, a historian, says he knew nothing about computers but believed they needed to start with the latest technology. When Finland offered to donate its analog telephone exchange to its poorer neighbor for free, Estonia turned it down.

The government recruited Ruusalepp, now Funderbeam’s CEO, as the new country’s first IT lawyer when she was just 20 and still a student. “I had no law degree and no understanding of technology,” she says. Her first task was to create a law for digital signatures, years ahead of many countries. “We wanted to change the country. We had brains, and we just had to shoot,” she says.

Those early decisions set the stage for today’s thriving tech scene in Estonia. Skype, founded in Tallinn in 2003, spawned a generation of techies and would-be entrepreneurs. “People thought, If Estonian guys could do something like Skype, I can do it also,” says Andrus Oks of Terra Venture Partners, an investment fund in Tallinn. And when Microsoft bought Skype in 2011 for $8.5 billion, ex-Skypers plowed money into new startups in Tallinn, further attracting U.S. investments. Skype’s founding developers, including Starship’s Heinla, also launched a venture capital fund, called Ambient Sound. “The Skype effect has been enormous,” says Heinla, who started Starship with Skype cofounder Janus Friis; major investors include Daimler A.G., as well as Silicon Valley firms Shasta Ventures and Matrix Partners.

Now, if you order Chinese takeout through platforms DoorDash or Postmates in Redwood City, Calif., or Washington, D.C., your food might arrive as a Starship test run, with a ping on your mobile phone letting you know your delivery robot is at the door. Starship is also doing test deliveries in Bern, Switzerland, and London, and Domino’s Pizza plans to test some deliveries by Starship soon in Hamburg.

The Skype effect does not end there. In 2011, Skype’s first employee, Taavet Hinrikus, cofounded TransferWise, an online money-transfer company, which now occupies four floors of a Tallinn building and handles about $1 billion a month in exchanges around the world. Investors include Andreessen Horowitz and Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures.

事后来看，俄罗斯跟弹丸小国爱沙尼亚出现冲突迟早不可避免，因为爱沙尼亚不仅成了重要科技中心，还在前苏联解体后积极加入北约和欧盟。

俄罗斯的报复出现在2007年，对爱沙尼亚来说也是记忆深刻的一年。当时爱沙尼亚政府决定将一座纪念二战苏联士兵的雕像从塔林市中心挪到附近的烈士公墓，维持数日的骚乱中亲俄示威者烧掉路障，洗劫商店。爱沙尼亚的银行、议会，还有一些公共服务设施突然断线，成为影响全国最严重的一次网络攻击。2007年的网络攻击到现在都让爱沙尼亚难以忘怀。“我们真的太依赖网络了。很多东西都没有纸质原版，” Guardtime的路贝尔表示。爱沙尼亚相信俄罗斯是网络攻击背后主使。

不久之后，唯一一家北约官方认可的网络安全中心落户塔林。当年爱沙尼亚在卢森堡开设了全球首个“数据使馆”，一座存有爱沙尼亚所有数据备份的建筑，享有与正常使馆同样的外交主权，可以在出现攻击时确保全国可以安全重启。“很明确的是，2007年后我们知道了如何应付外部攻击，”路贝尔表示。“现在最担心的是如果出现系统内部攻击怎么办，如果有人故意破坏数据怎么办？”

With hindsight, it seems inevitable that Russia would sooner or later collide with its pint-size former territory, which, aside from becoming a major tech hub, had rushed to join both NATO and the EU after the Soviet collapse.

Russia’s payback finally came in 2007—and it would markedly change Estonia. It happened when Estonia’s government decided to move a World War II memorial statue of a Soviet soldier from central Tallinn to a nearby war cemetery. Pro-Russian demonstrators burned barricades and looted stores in days of rioting. Then Estonia’s banks, its Parliament, and several public services suddenly went off-line, in one of the biggest-ever distributed denial-of-service attacks to hit a country. The 2007 cyberattack still haunts Estonia. “We were already really, really dependent on online. We had no paper originals for a lot of things,” says Guardtime’s Ruubel. Estonia believes Russia was behind the attack.

Shortly after, the only NATO-accredited cyberdefense center opened in Tallinn. And this year Estonia will open the world’s first “data embassy” in Luxembourg—a storage building to house an entire backup of Estonia’s data that will enjoy the same sovereign rights as a regular embassy but be able to reboot the country remotely, in case of another attack. “It was quite clear after 2007 that we knew how to fight against external attacks,” Ruubel says. “The worry was, What if there was an ¬attack from inside the system, with someone tampering with the data?”

解决内部攻击问题还是要靠技术手段，也是现在爱沙尼亚系统和一些最成功创业公司的重要部分。未来可以确保爱沙尼亚稳步增长的技术就是区块链。

区块链本质上是分布式数据库，也是加密数字货币比特币的技术基础，简单来说就是保存公共记录，永远不可能被消除或重写。爱沙尼亚的工程师们可以利用这项技术强化加密数据，随时可检查数据是否出现篡改。爱沙尼亚完成很多在线任务时都要通过两步验证。爱沙尼亚人表示，通过诸多安全手段，系统几乎不可破解。（去年美国国务院表示，网络犯罪对爱沙尼亚“不是大问题”。）对比的案例是爱德华·斯诺登在18个月里入侵美国国家安全局。“斯诺登不可能破解我们的系统，”总统卡柳莱德自豪地说。

不过在爱沙尼亚之外，还是有不少人担心安全性是否真如对外宣称。2014年，也即疑似俄罗斯攻击七年后，密歇根大学的工程师们研究了爱沙尼亚的在线投票系统，在报告中总结称只要俄罗斯特工等人下定决心，就可以攻破系统，制造假投票或通过修改票数操纵大选，“很可能一丝痕迹都不留”。“爱沙尼亚的系统极其信任选举服务器和选民的电脑，这些对境外势力来说都很容易破解，”研究人员表示。爱沙尼亚对此表示否认，表示投票系统在过去六次大选中运行稳定，而且“安全级别比起纸质投票高得多。”

对爱沙尼亚人来说，政府和商业可能完全采用数字系统的未来让人应接不暇，随着区块链技术的应用，一切还是刚刚开始。Guardtime如今有150位员工，2015年收入约为2300万美元，已成为全世界最大的区块链公司之一，客户遍布全球，从军火公司洛克希德·马丁到美国国防部都在其中。Funderbeam采用了所谓的彩色硬币技术追踪交易和投资，其技术基础是比特币公共区块链。应用技术后就不再需要经纪人和清算代理。

The answer to that concern came in the form of the technology that now underpins crucial parts of Estonia’s system, as well as some of its most successful startups, and that, in the years ahead, could help power the country’s future growth: the blockchain.

Essentially a distributed database, a blockchain—the system that also underpins the cryptocurrency Bitcoin—serves as a public ledger that can never be erased or rewritten. The technology allows Estonia’s engineers to strengthen its encrypted data and lets Estonians verify at any time that their information has not been tampered with. Estonians are also required to use two-step verification for many online tasks. These and other security measures, say Estonians, make their system as close to unbreakable as possible. (The U.S. State Department said last year that cybercrime “does not represent a major threat” in Estonia.) They contrast it, for example, to Edward Snowden’s hacking into the NSA, which he continued over 18 months. “No Snowden can crack this system,” boasts President Kaljulaid.

Outside the country, however, there are some doubts as to whether the Estonians’ technology is as secure as they claim. In 2014—seven years after the suspected Russian hack—engineers at the University of Michigan studied Estonia’s online-voting system and concluded that determined hackers—such as Russian operatives—could feasibly penetrate it, creating fake votes or altering the totals in order to rig elections “quite possibly without a trace,” they wrote in their report. “Estonia’s system places extreme trust in election servers and voters’ computers—all easy targets for a foreign power,” they said. Estonia disputed the claims, saying that it had worked flawlessly in six elections and that it had “a level of security greater than was possible with paper ballots.”

To Estonians, the potential of ¬extreme-digital systems for both governments and businesses is dizzying—and with the blockchain, it has only just begun. Guardtime, which has 150 employees and estimates about $23 million in revenues in 2015, is now among the world’s biggest blockchain companies, with clients around the world, including Lockheed Martin and the U.S. Department of Defense. Funderbeam uses so-called colored coin technology, based on the public Bitcoin blockchain, to keep track of transactions and investments. That eliminates the need for brokers and clearing agents.

Ruusalepp成立Funderbeam初期，支持者包括硅谷的风险投资人蒂姆·德雷珀。Ruusalepp经常听到美国人宣称纸质资料更安全。她表示，爱沙尼亚人无法接受医疗档案放在医生办公室的文件夹里。“谁看过你的资料都不知道，”她表示，“区块链解决了信任问题。”

创立爱沙尼亚系统的人表示，美国关于数据安全的讨论大多偏题了。关注的重点应该是通过区块链技术让人们自由控制谁能接触数据。“真正的问题是数据完整性，”住在新泽西州利奥尼亚的爱沙尼亚裔美国人托马斯·亨里克·伊尔维斯表示，伊尔维斯从2006年到去年11月曾担任爱沙尼亚总统，如今是斯坦福大学国际安全与合作中心高级研究员，也是世界经济理事会区块链未来讨论组成员。他表示，美国杂乱的机构要想打造爱沙尼亚式的区块链架构还需要很多年。“硅谷和斯坦福让我大开眼界，创新之多令人震惊，”伊尔维斯表示，“但是公共领域的创新实在太落后了。”

爱沙尼亚虽然打造了可能是全世界最精密的数字系统，但也面临限制：规模太小。爱沙尼亚只有130万人，当然能运转良好。但工程师表示系统大量闲置。只要正确配置，系统可以处理海量数据。（爱沙尼亚技术人员表示，理论上美国可以重新设计数据库，完全可以供3亿美国人使用。）为了充分利用科技实力并推动经济发展，爱沙尼亚需要更多市场参与者。

Ruusalepp, whose early backers at Funderbeam included the Silicon Valley venture capital investor Tim Draper, says she regularly hears Americans argue that paper records are more secure. Estonians, by contrast, would be aghast to have their medical records in paper folders in doctors’ offices, she says. “You can never see who has looked at your data,” she says. “Blockchain solves the issue of trust.”

Those who created Estonia’s system say they believe the arguments raging in the U.S. over data privacy are largely misplaced. The focus should instead be to give people control over who accesses their data, by using blockchain technology. “The real issue is data integrity,” says Toomas Hendrik Ilves, an Estonian-American from Leonia, N.J., who served as Estonia’s President from 2006 until last November, and is now a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation and sits on the World Economic Council’s Future of Blockchain group. He says it could take many years for the U.S.’s sprawling agencies to create an Estonian-type blockchain architecture. “I’m smack in the middle of Silicon Valley, at Stanford, and the amount of creativity is amazing,” Ilves says. “But the public sector is lagging way, way, way behind.”

Having built perhaps the world’s most seamless digital system, Estonia still faces a major limitation: its size. With just 1.3 million Estonians, it runs like a well-oiled machine. But engineers claim there is vast spare capacity. Built right, the system could work with huge numbers. (The U.S. could in theory reengineer its databases from scratch, say Estonian technologists, and serve 300 million Americans just as well.) To more fully leverage its technological advantage and boost economic growth, Estonia needs more market participants.

爱沙尼亚没什么机会吸引移民远赴寒冷的北欧，所以想出一记怪招，又是个世界首创：提供虚拟身份。38岁的软件工程师和创业者塔维·科特卡2013年担任政府首席信息官后，创造出虚拟“e身份”概念。科特卡撰写额一份政策文件，认为人口需要快速增长，建议到2025年增长到1000万人。爱沙尼亚女性不可能一人生10个孩子，所以只能想想爱沙尼亚有什么产品可以向全世界提供。爱沙尼亚的e身份有点像总部在德拉华州的美国公司，有了身份可以远程在欧洲经营，用欧元结算。“我们喜欢微型或小型企业，因为我们国家本来也不大，”科特卡表示。他现在担任爱沙尼亚创业公司顾问。“没有顾客就不可能成长。”

2014年12月爱沙尼亚颁发了第一张e身份卡。卡片里的微芯片跟爱沙尼亚数字身份证一样，只是没有公民权，例如选举或公共养老金，不用在爱沙尼亚缴税。不过这可不是避税手段：爱沙尼亚要求e身份持卡人在本国缴纳税费。只要花145欧元（约合154美元），e身份持卡人就能在爱沙尼亚成立公司，不管实际在哪都能立刻接入巨大的欧盟市场，英国退欧后人口还是有4.4亿人。目前共有18000人领取了e身份，约1400人已经在爱沙尼亚成立了公司。平均算下来，每个公司每月要在会计服务和办公行政上支出55欧元（约合58美元）。

今年政府在e身份上的预算加倍，预计2018年会再次加倍，政府表示会迅速增加e身份数量。随着数字增加，爱沙尼亚提供的商业服务也会同步增长。如今各国官员纷纷飞向塔林，学习如何开创本国的e身份计划。项目总裁卡斯帕·科耶斯表示每年办公室里接待的代表团约有500个。“目前国家唯一的收入模式是税，”他表示，“但如果我们能吸引1000万个e身份持卡人，每个月支付100美元，或许就不用再收税了。”

可能性还不止于此。由于政府通过区块链运转，理论上爱沙尼亚可以推广各种发明，开创大量新业务。前总理拉塔斯表示，爱沙尼亚正在研发“精准医疗”，利用130万人的基因数据更准确地诊断疾病，提供治疗并研制个性化药物。“我们会用区块链技术确保数据交流可追溯，”他表示。

未来，爱沙尼亚政府的想法确实可能变成数十亿美元的业务，也将政府从提供公共服务的官僚机构变为盈利的实体。

Since Estonia had little means for attracting masses of immigrants to its icy Northern European landscape, it came up with a quirky idea—another of its firsts in the world: offering people virtual residency. Taavi Kotka, 38, a software engineer and entrepreneur, dreamed up the concept after becoming the government’s chief information officer in 2013. Kotka wrote a policy paper arguing that the population needed to grow fast, and proposed a target of 10 million people by 2025. Since Estonian women were not about to have 10 babies each, the alternative was to figure out what kind of product the country could offer to the rest of the world. Somewhat like Delaware-based corporations in the U.S., e-residents of Estonia can now run their European operations remotely and do business in euros. “We want to be the office for micro and small companies, because that is basically what our country is,” say Kotka, who now works as a consultant to Estonian startups. “You cannot grow without customers.”

Estonia’s first e-residency cards rolled out in December 2014. The micro¬chips inside them are identical to Estonians’ digital ID cards but come without citizens’ rights, like voting or public pensions, and there is no obligation to pay taxes in Estonia. This is no tax haven: Estonia requires that e-residents pay their taxes to whatever country they owe them. But for a fee of 145 euros (about $154) e-residents can register companies in Estonia, no matter where they live, gaining automatic access to the EU’s giant common market—about 440 million once Britain leaves the union. Of about 18,000 e-residents so far, about 1,400 have formed companies in Estonia. On average, each of those companies spends roughly 55 euros (about $58) a month on accounting and office administration in Estonia.

This year the government doubled its budget for the program and intends on doubling it again in 2018, saying it’s determined to ramp up e-residency numbers quickly. As numbers grow, so too will the business services Estonia offers. Officials have traveled to Tallinn from around the world to examine how to start their own e-residency programs. Kaspar Korjus, managing director of the e-residency program, says his office hosts about 500 delegations a year. “So far the only revenue model for countries is taxes,” he says. “But if we get 10 million e-residents paying $100 a month each, maybe we would not need taxes.”

The possibilities do not end there. With its government running on the blockchain, Estonia could in theory begin marketing other inventions as they unfold—creating huge new business. Rõivas, the former Prime Minister, says Estonia is working on developing “precision medicine” that would tap into the genome data of its 1.3 million citizens in order to better diagnose illnesses, treat people, and design personalized drugs. “We can use blockchain to make sure that the data exchanged is able to be traced,” he says.

It’s possible to imagine Estonia’s idea becoming a multibillion-dollar business in the years ahead—turning the whole view of government as a bureaucracy offering public services into an entity generating profits.

或许只有1991年从头开始建设的地方才能重新构想国家的观念。正当我盯着塔林办公室外的Starship送货机器人，首席执行官赫恩拉告诉我，他相信在前苏联统治几十年后，爱沙尼亚最适合开创新的做事方式，包括管理政府。“人们从小长大看到的都是封闭的政府机构，”那么爱沙尼亚人就打造新型机构，而且更高效。世界上其他地方仍然秉持传统，固步自封，对新鲜事物充满怀疑，所以迟迟没有起身追赶。可别指望爱沙尼亚会停下等我们。（财富中文网）

本文另一版本刊登于2017年5月1日出版的《财富》杂志，标题为《欢迎来到明日世界》。

译者：Charlie

审稿：夏林

Perhaps only a place that started over from scratch in 1991 could reimagine the idea of a country. As I watch the Starship robots maneuver across the company’s office in Tallinn, CEO Heinla says he believes Estonians, after decades of living under Soviet rule, were uniquely suited to creating new ways of doing things, including how to run a government. “People grow up and see an establishment they cannot break into,” he says, so Estonians simply built something new, and more efficient. Older, more set in its ways—and more skeptical—the rest of the world has yet to catch up. Just don’t expect Estonia to wait for us.

A version of this article appears in the May 1, 2017 issue of Fortune with the headline "Welcome to Tomorrow Land."