I Attended the First Official Digital Wedding

By December 1, 2015Bitcoin Business

<p>Cash is fine, too.</p> Photographer: Sean Gallup Tech

I just attended the strangest wedding: The whole world was invited, and it went almost without a hitch.

Starting Tuesday, the government of Estonia, in a partnership with an organization called Bitnation, is offering public notary services to Estonian e-residents. Its first official act was to register the marriage of two Spanish-born residents of London, Edurne Lolnaz and Mayel de Borniol. The marriage won’t be recorded anywhere; instead, it’ll be part of a blockchain — a distributed database accessible to anyone with a private key, much like the process that registers bitcoin transactions.

This is not the first blockchain wedding — David Mondrus and Joyce Bayo got hitched last year — but it’s the first with any kind of government sanction. The Estonian e-residency program is available to people who don’t live in the small Baltic state but would like to use its jurisdiction for business. You can sign up online, but a trip to Estonia is required to open a bank account. Then, a company can be set up and administered online (Estonia has no corporate tax on reinvested profits). An e-resident’s card isn’t a residence permit, and an Estonian citizen would need to register a marriage in the time-tested way. The e-residency is intended for those who don’t want to put down roots anywhere except the Internet, so it makes sense that it now comes with the opportunity to get "officially" married in the virtual realm.

The blockchain "notarization" may be untested and not recognized by courts and other authorities, but its advocates hope it will gain currency once more people adopt it, in the same way as bitcoin.

On a site they made to announce their wedding, Lolnaz and de Borniol, who had met online, wrote: We are glomads — our lives […]

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