ESTONIA: TECH SAVVY BUT BITCOIN LEERY

LONDON (InsideBitcoins) – Estonia, a small country in the Baltic, bordered by Latvia, the Baltic Sea, the Gulf of Finland and Russia, it is one of the least populous countries in the Eurozone; there are more people living in central London than there are in the whole of Estonia.
Bitcoin, it would seem is none too welcome in these parts. BTC. EE recently closed its doors under suspicion of money laundering, despite the extremely low level of trade it was conducting; transactions in the currency too are subject to VAT, which is set at 20% on each and every transfer.
Estonia is well known as a tech savvy country, it has favourable tax policies aimed at start-ups, it is fully integrated into the EU and a member of the Eurozone since 2011 – the country has even declared access to the Internet to be a basic human right and just last year Finnish silver investor and Bitcoin entrepreneur Risto Pietil purchased a castle in Estonia with the intention of making it into a centre for bitcoin innovation.

This post was published at Inside Bitcoins on Dec 8, 2014.