Leonid Bershidsky, Columnist

I Attended the First Official Digital Wedding

Estonia has approved civil contracts recorded in the blockchain.

December 1, 2015 at 7:42 PM UTC

Leonid Bershidsky, formerly Bloomberg Opinion’s Europe columnist, is a member of the Bloomberg News Automation Team. He recently published Russian translations of George Orwell’s “1984” and Franz Kafka’s “The Trial.”

Cash is fine, too.
Photographer: Sean Gallup

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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.