Do you know Gene Sharp? He was a objector to the Vietnam War, and he and Albert Einstein corresponded and he was kind of a leader in creating the nonviolent action. So he did a whole thesis on how nonviolence or nonviolent protest actually is more effective than violence.

Yes, this whole NVC school.

Yes, that’s right. And so then so he created this institute called the Albert Einstein Institution. And then there’s a young woman named Jamila Raqib, who was a fellow with me at the Media Lab, and she’s running the institution. He died and she’s kind of now getting a network of both scholars as well as activists, who are supporting this nonviolent action thing.

She wanted to reach out to you. Can I connect you?

Of course. I mean, my email is public knowledge. It’s on Twitter, but my work email is this. So feel free to just write.

She’s wonderful. So I enjoyed your comments yesterday and it connects very much with what we’re doing in Japan. So just to give you an update, so Prime Minister Kishida took power last year and as he was coming into office, they were trying to figure out what to do.

So they created sort of three different clusters of discussion in the government. One was a new kind of capitalism because the young people were reading communist books and they were thinking that capitalism was the cause of many of the problems, which is part of what this book is about. And then the other one was they wanted to help local governments, and they’ve been trying forever to help local regions.

Obviously, there’s a political reason to do that. And the third one was they felt they needed to help startups. So they had all these committees. And last year, as NFTs were growing and web3 was growing, I started to talk to people about it. And I think that the Japanese government realized that.

And there’s a small group of politicians working on this, that web3 was a good way to connect all these things together. We can do DAOs and local governments, it’s a new kind of capitalism and it can help startups. So the team and I helped them put together a report that Kishida-san actually embraced and he started saying that web3 is kind of the pillar of the new Japanese reform.

And interestingly, last year, towards the end of the year, we were all talking about web3, even the opposition party campaigned in support of web3. So Japan became very pro web3 and then Japan, just to give a little bit of history, so like 2013-14 when Mt. Gox was hacked, it put Bitcoin on the map.

But interestingly, what happened after that discussion was Japan passed one of the first, I think the first sort of federal level payment systems digital asset law.

The mainstreaming effort.

That’s right. which then unlocked the ability for people to make exchanges. So it took off in Japan, but then in 2018 we had the Coincheck hack and I was a senior independent advisor to the JFSA helping them at the time. They tightened it so much that you couldn’t do anything. So Japan has been basically crypto offline from 2018 until now.

So after FTX and Terra Luna happened, very few Japanese were exposed to that risk. So the way I’ve been describing it is that Japan was sitting in a penalty box while everybody else was skating around and now they’re all on the floor and they were just opening the penalty box and Japan’s coming skating out. And also because Japan is quite secluded, you know, I wrote a book and others have been talking and we’ve been able to change the narrative for web3 in Japan to be more about, you know, a lot of things you talked about.

So as a new way to coordinate non-profit efforts, research, local governments and trying to shift away from the crypto trader to the normal people. One of the challenges is that the regulations were created before we had smart contracts. So it treats digital currency as assets.

We noticed that. The classification is different from everybody else.

That’s right. And it’s because we only saw Bitcoin. And it was good at the beginning because it was clear, but it’s now clear in the wrong way. You have to pay tax on digital assets as if it’s cash, which is bad. So anyway, but the government got so behind it, so now we passed this stablecoin law.

We are in the process of trying to pass a DAO law, and we’re trying to change our regulations so that for things like NFTs and DAOs, we can focus more on the social benefit. I think what’s important globally, so like for instance, the reason, as you know, that that capital gains tax is low is the theory that those sorts of investments help society. And no one right now thinks that crypto helps society…

I do.

We do, yes. But we have to prove it. And the chicken and egg we have now is that most of the governments don’t want to make a law unless they’re good examples. But the people who are trying to make good examples don’t want to break the law, so they’re waiting for the law.

So it’s a little chicken and egg. So what I’m trying to do with the Japanese government is to come up with good examples of social benefit from web3. So you know Hal Seki even better than I do. So he and I are working on this quite a bit.

So at my university, Chiba Institute of Technology, we made an NFT-based, what’s it called, certificate of completion of my class and then we did it on the blockchain and the reason we did that and we used the blockcerts which my team created at Media Lab, it’s an open protocol for certification and uses the W3C, what is it?

Decentralized Identifiers and Verifiable Credentials.

Yeah, it’s using the DIDs and it’s doing the verifiable credentials and then Hal wanted to do certificates at the digital agency so we just gave him the code and we’ve made it all open source and now we went to Nepal and the education minister of Nepal signed a thing saying he’s going to do it and Vietnam’s going to do it.

And so what we’re trying to do is to build this and I’m trying very hard to keep it unofficial. So one of the things is we’re trying not to force standardization around the idea or anything just to try to create interoperability. And one of the things that I’m saying and I want to get your opinion on this, but I’m saying that the problem with a lot of the standards process in Japan is that it’s centralized.

You have to have, you end up with a committee and a chairman and a blah blah blah…

It’s a mutex, a giant lock.

Exactly. And it’s a centralized thing. So what’s neat about this NFT based one is that everyone can do it without permission. It’s all open source. And as long as we keep interoperability, we don’t force anybody to do one thing or the other. And so at the digital agency, Hal was involved, but we had a study group around web3, and we decided to make a DAO.

And so we now have a DAO and Hal and me and some of the other board members are doing it. What we’re thinking about is opening this up. And we’re thinking of having the things like this digital certificate discussion in the DAO and inviting the other ministries as well as people from the public and private sector as well as other countries and we already announced that we have a DAO so it’s kind of neat because the first kind of public DAO in Japan is spinning out of the digital agency.

We’re trying to make that an example because I think what will be neat because it’s a DAO will bring in a consensus building process. A lot of it will be modeled around the work that you’ve done. It will hopefully have some credibility because we have all these people will be building consensus to make a statement and we’ll send those statements into the government.

We’re trying to get individuals from the different ministries to join but we’re trying to make it a very DAO-like association that’s going to have opinions about digital policy and we’re trying to connect it out internationally as well.

So anyway, that’s the experiment and Hal is very central to this. And we’re trying to figure out who else to bring in and who else we can learn from. So it’s a multi-pronged thing. So we’re trying to make an example for DAOs. We’re trying to create a new way of doing coordination without over-standardization. And we’re trying to make a kind of a global network there. So I’m curious if this plugs into anything you’re doing here.

Indeed, there’s a dedicated DAO/web3 section within our ministry in the Department of Democracy Network. We don’t have a Department of International Cooperation. It’s called Democracy Network instead.

Democracy Network.

Yeah, the DN. And the reason we chose this name is that we want to network with people who are pro-democracy even if they live in authoritarian regimes. So it’s a different take of public diplomacy. And web3 is actually perfect for this.

As I mentioned in my opening keynote in the afternoon yesterday, participation for innovative public good is easier to prove if you show that this is for international solidarity-based security. Because public security, including national defense, is by default public good. It is actually the textbook example of the public good. As long as the military doesn’t try to attack other neighboring countries, of course.

Defense-oriented public security is by default a public good. DAOs are great to establish this coordination between the countries who don’t otherwise have Track 1 diplomatic ties. I mean, Taiwan and Japan are now very close to Track 1, but still not fully Track 1.

As for Taiwan and other jurisdictions that are still trying to figure out how close to be with Taiwan… I was just in Lithuania. And they can give me e-residency without any doubt. So I’m a Lithuanian e-resident now, which means that I get to sign contracts as a Lithuanian, and therefore part of EU, and therefore part of eIDAS, and therefore part of the European blockchain. And so the idea is that the individualization is up to each individual.

In Taiwan, we have this da0 (DAO-Zero), like g0v (Gov-Zero), but for DAO. It is a g0v project, with lots of DN people, and myself is involved in the da0. However, we frame it so that it’s international at the beginning. So it’s not something that we want to build as replacing our local association structure with local government and so on. Because for domestic registered associations, I mean, they already have a pretty good co-op or association infrastructure. However, for the international DAOs joining, it’s difficult.

So our main strategy is just to say, “Okay, if you have an international DAO, we don’t force you to set up a local association. That’s not practical. However, we will hand that DAO a legal personhood e-residency. So it’s like e-residency for DAOs. And so if your DAO, for example, is interested in having members that are Taiwanese, then we’re happy to just give your DAO a kind of legal personhood certificate, an XCA, which we issue from Taiwan. So that establishes a mutually recognizable digital signature link, but it doesn’t necessarily confer company status, for example for tax purposes.

And so by defining this as an international association legal personhood, we avoid this whole company tax, whatever you just talked about, of over sorting it into the bin of for-profit company sense. So I think there’s a lot of synergies.

That’s really interesting. And maybe we should look at doing something similar in Japan, and maybe we should try to put that in the upcoming DAO law. Because what we’re trying to do, they, the liberal democratic party team that’s going to do a politicians’ law of proposal. They’re trying to find ways to carve out applications of DAOs that shouldn’t be overly regulated. So it sounds similar. So I’m sure this is all online?

Yeah, it’s all online, and I can connect you to the DN people in charge of this, because it would be interesting to see if we can do a similar thing and cooperate there.

That would be great. In terms of local governments, are you doing any DAO-like support for co-ops and things like that?

Definitely. A lot of the local government, municipality and so on, have worked with people who joined our, it’s called quadratic funding, a web3 thing. I would say, a QF venture, right? There’s a QF incubator that we launched at 100.adi.gov.tw, ADI for Administration for Digital Industries. So, the 100.adi.gov.tw basically asks the people who work locally to reimagine their services if the communication technology has advanced to a point where co-presence is a reality.

So a projection from what they used to deliver locally to what could work actually across distance. And they submit those ideas and the top 100, we coach them to — because in Taiwan, crowdfunding platforms are very popular — to do a not for-profit but for-good crowdfunding round. However, the crowdfunding sites all agree in a privacy-enhancing way to share the kind of unique individuals that joined.

So if you join on this crowdfunding platform, that crowdfunding platform, but you’re the same individual, then you only count as one vote for quadratic funding. And then we calculate the score as the sum of all the square roots of each individual contribution, meaning that to get a lot of people joining is as important, if not more important as one wealthy donor. Because the traditional problem with matching funds is that you can just get a loan with a very large donor and then you win everything.

With quadratic funding, we are surfacing the top 20 or so and elevate them from the local DAO or local association into a national or even international presence. And for those within it that we can see a necessity, then maybe we use the Universal Service Fund or many other funding sources at our disposal to say that this is now as essential as broadband-as-a-human-right and so on.

So basically we rely on the collective intelligence to solve the traditional safety innovation dilemma. We trust that the top 20 that wins this quadratic funding round will already have overcome the dilemma and can show us how to overcome it together.

Interesting. And so are you using some blockchain-based ID system for the federated network of quadratic funding?

So because we currently limited to only residents and citizens and we have a very strong PKI-based authentication mechanism already, we don’t have to use DIDs for this round.

Yeah.

However, of the many cases that joined us in this 100 proposed to connect, for example, is so-called overseas compatriots. Right? So the second and third generation Taiwanese. And for them, we don’t have a good PKI anymore. So we have to either cross-recognize with whatever their country’s PKI is, or we’ll have to invent something based on the DIDs.

So it’s on the elevation of those ideas to the international level part, later this year, that we will have to adopt DIDs. So we joined W3C and FIDO with this particular use case.

Interesting. That’s really interesting.

And this is also, is this the g0v people that are working on this, or is it…?

Well, I’m one of the g0v people…

There you go.

So the boundary here is actually very blurry… We have da0 people who are also full-time staff, and one is at DN working on web3, Mashbean is the name, and he had to declare a non-conflict-of-interest, and then all the DAO members that he co-founded, the VolDAO, have signed saying that they are truly a non-profit, non-organization. And of course, they signed not very digitally, so maybe we have to fix that…

But anyway, so the point I’m making is that we want to encourage overlaps. We think a lot of the governance hiccups is because the people who work on safety, security, innovation, progress, and undemocratic participation, they don’t talk to each other’s groups. But if someone can belong to all three groups together, and if we have that much of those someones as part of the DN, then we stand ready to engage in a way that doesn’t feel bureaucratic and top-down.

I see. That’s interesting. Yeah, we should get Hal to become the head of digital agency, then he can have a mirror organization.

Exactly.

That’s very interesting. Okay, well, I’ll poke Hal and we’ll see if we can, because I know the DID thing is also very important in Japan and it’s not exactly the same, but we have also the My Number card that’s rolling out and trying to figure out the international piece. I guess Japan isn’t as focused on helping international people as much as you, but the one area, and this is where Vietnam and Nepal come in, is Japan needs more engineering talent.

Exactly.

And this becomes an important area.

Are you giving them e-residency so that they can experience the feeling of being Japanese before actually joining?

Yeah. I think that we are actually starting to talk about helping with visa application using this credentialing. Do you have an e-credentialing system? I’m sure you do. And what’s, where does that live and what’s the protocol?

Sure. So, a couple of things. So our digital signature act, which was done around the turn of the century, already allows for recognizing overseas CAs. So all it takes for us, which we did last year, is to simply say that anything that the NIST or the ISO or whatever international organization ratifies as a credentialing signature system, we strongly suggest automatically recognize it to count as legal in Taiwan.

So this is a kind of one-way notarization recognition. The other way can be done quite easily by making sure that we use the standardized FIDO, PKCS, and so on, those infrastructures, and then just publish it to a place like IPFS, where everybody else automatically has access. So this is like the time when I sent a pull request to the Tokyo Metropolitan COVID dashboard, right?

Instead of doing a Track 1, like “my ambassador talks to your ambassador,” it’s the public place that’s GitHub that I just sent a pull request. So that’s our strategy.

That’s very cool. Interesting. And that’s consistent with what I’m trying to do with this credentialing process where you just write it to the blockchain. We just have brainstorming meetings, not regulatory meetings.

Exactly. Yes.

You know, I don’t know if they still do it, but there were these hacker clubs and I think it was called hackerspaces.org and the heads of these hackerspaces would meet. They’re all like pirates, they’re all independent. But what they did was they had meetings and they shared patterns.

So there’s like some of the ones that I like, there was one called the bike shed pattern and the bike shed pattern was complicated things like let’s build a nuclear reactor. Most people don’t understand, so they don’t have an opinion. But when they’re arguing about the color of the bike shed, everybody has an opinion.

There we are all experts.

Well, and it takes the whole meeting. And so what they do is they say, okay, if we start spending too much time on stupid point, they call it bike shed pattern, and everybody knows what it means. So what they did was they write it out, and then they share these patterns with everybody, each other. Do you know this stuff? And so that I think is a really good way of governance where everyone’s sharing but not forcing and the best practices win.

Stigmergy.

Yes, exactly. So it would be interesting. So let me, I’ll look this up as well because then maybe we can, because I think publishing to IPFS is interesting. We haven’t thought of that. So I’ll suggest that.

Our entire website, moda.gov.tw is on IPFS. So ipns://moda.gov.tw/. And during the cyber attack last August, a lot of people just volunteered to keep us afloat.

Oh, interesting.

And so this is a very strong participation-for-safety case. Because web3 technologies grow up in an adverse environment. So it’s value only shine when there’s actual adversity.

Very interesting. Daum, do you want to…

Nice to meet you. 我叫茶蓮, 我是在韓國出生, 然後在青島生長, 然後在 18 歲時去日本. 現在和 Joi 一起工作.

I had a question to ask, but it’s not really related to the above…

It’s okay. We’re at a good point anyway.

So because of my background as a Korean, Chinese and Japanese, being a transcultural person myself, finding a community for me was always very important because I don’t have one clear identity where I could call home but at the same time that means that anywhere can be home. So I’ve always used like online communities, I had a Facebook page when I was 15 years old to find like like-minded people who’s like me and then to build my own identity using online platforms.

It’s my first time in Taipei, and I noticed that young people in my generation seem to be more engaged with the government community. Also because of your work in raising awareness about citizen involvement in government activities, I think it really strengthened the relationship between my generation and the government.

So I was wondering what has been the challenges that you went through during this phase, and what do you think are the opportunities, especially in the context of web3, to strengthen this relationship with the citizen, and especially with people my age?

Yeah, it’s a great question. It’s a seminar topic that I can talk for three hours. [laughs]

The core challenge is, as I mentioned, the innovation-safety dilemma.

And of course young people want to participate, but some want to participate to enhance safety, and some want to participate to enhance innovation, the speed of innovation. And in many jurisdictions, those two groups of people don’t necessarily talk to each other. They develop different norms, different cultures around safety and innovation, respectively.

And then the social media came, and then it amplified what used to be simple disagreements into tribal fights, polarization, and so on. So it’s not that the young people are susceptible to tribal fights or vain social status comparisons or whatever, but rather the space in which they interact in is sometimes antisocial by default, by elevating the takes, the dunks, the retweets, and so on, so this is like a virus.

So the main challenge is that there’s a generation of people whose identities are found on the overlapping intersectionality of the groups that we belong. So we’re all multi-homed people and our identity is on those intersections. Yet we engage in platforms that amplify only the conflicting part of those overlaps instead of the pro-social part of the overlaps. So that’s the main challenge.

So the main work that we do is just to find new patterns. Sometimes as simple as saying there’s no reply button that creates a thread, but rather elevating like the community notes on Twitter, only the voices that speaks broadly to the people of dividing ideologies. So nonviolent communication actualized as code.

By creating those spaces, we magically then see that the young people who care about environmental sustainability and so on, can see that the people who care about, say, innovation in material sciences, in community organization, or very diverse fields, they now see a common goal to band together instead of fighting over the trivialities, the back-shedding.

Raising the agenda-setting power to the collective intelligence through a pro-social space, that’s the main challenge.

It’s kind of like you had a forum, right, three years ago, and you didn’t have a reply button, right?

Exactly. It’s still to this day, like the join.gov.tw platform. We didn’t invent this — Pol.is came from Seattle, and on Join there’s two columns, pro and con, but no reply between those two columns — that came from Iceland, from Better Reykjavík.

Yes. I like the fact that you can still dislike, you can still disagree, but you just can’t reply.

Exactly.

Is that so going on?

Join.gov.tw is still going on. It’s inspired by vTaiwan. So vTaiwan started in 2014, Join started in 2015. And then vTaiwan relies on a lot of grassroots organization. So the group was not meeting as frequently during the pandemic. But Join still is very active; there we worked together with many people younger than 18, to which the Join platform was their main agenda-setting platform because they couldn’t vote, you see. So they work together with people who are 70 years old to set a lot of very innovative policy agendas on the Join platform.

That’s very interesting. And what do you think is the 20s and 30s perception towards the digital industry here and how much are they involved right now? Because I feel like in Japan, I’m saying this as a non-Japanese, I feel like just young generation, they don’t really vote in general. They don’t think that their voices are heard to the government’s act. But I feel like the case is slightly opposite here.

Well, would they “like” and “unlike”? Surely that’s voting, right?

Yes. But they don’t have that, I don’t think. And I don’t think they see the need of having to raise their voice even though they have a different opinion. But I think it’s opposite here.

Exactly.

So what do you think really triggered this community of citizen government to become a unified community?

Yeah, as I mentioned, it’s all about whether you share agenda-setting power. Because the thing for a nuclear plant is that it’s hard to share agenda-setting power because it requires so much context — the people who can contextualize these already knew each other anyway. And so that makes the conversation more exclusive to those people. Of course, that means actually we should work on generative AI to solve the contextualization problem…

But before that happens, the younger people in many jurisdictions feel that all they get to work on were trivial issues like bike shedding. “So the nuclear plant is going to be built, but let’s talk about the painting on the wall or whatever…”

And of course that leads to a sense of learned helplessness. Like if I spend time on this and I don’t have agenda-setting power, somebody else set an agenda with the context I don’t understand, and then I get to suggest the color of the wall. So that’s the kind of number one reason for learned helplessness for many of the younger generation.

We don’t see the younger generation as simply voices, but rather we call them digital transformation ambassadors. In Moda, the T Ambassadors program, ask people who freshly graduated or even not yet graduated to be ambassadors from the digital world to the analog world. Five of them in a team would work with a local social entrepreneur, night market, whatever, to help them digitally transform.

And when that happens, they have all the agenda-setting power, because the elderly people and so on all want to connect to more people, but the younger people by default know what to do. And so instead of saying IT, which will only limit the people to a very tiny percentage, we say digital natives, which is everyone. And so I think 87% of our key ambassadors didn’t come from an IT background. So maybe philosophy, music, culture, whatever, but they are digital natives. And so they don’t work as interns, rather they work as ambassadors. I think that frame is very important.

And do you reward these ambassadors?

Yeah, of course. I have a year of pay subsidized by the government. And also NFTs, soulbound NFTs that show their contributions, their impact certificates, and so on. So I think for these young people, having the impact certificates to their name is even more tangible than this coin. Because it’s hard to show this coin across a video conference with the same gravitas. But if there’s a digital signature from the digital ministry, that’s easily verified. So I’m on Ethereum and Tezos and so on. I have those soulbound NFTs too.

That’s fascinating. Thank you very much. That’s a good name, Impact Certificates. We should do that.

インパクト サーティフィケート.

Or just always say “IC”.

“I see.” [laughs]

The term “hypercerts”, I translate it as “超證”.

“超” as in super and “證” as in a certificate. So it’s easier to remember — “Hypercert” that’s three syllables, but “超證” only two syllables.

By default, the less syllables, the more likely to win a meme war, right?

That could be translated into Japanese kanji too, 超証 (Chōshō).

One interesting thing I realized, we gave away, I think, two or three hundred certificates for the two classes that we did. And I think in Japan right now, people, it’s like, wallets is like three and a half, four percent. But every single student created a wallet to receive their certificate. I think it’s a good reason for people to get into.

Exactly, and they’re not crypto-anarcho-libertarian-maximalists.

For the T Ambassador, we deliberately chose the Kukai wallet for the Tezos blockchain, meaning that all they have to do is to sign up with their Gmail, which is not total decentralization. But it’s good enough because the Gmail sign-in is actually a digital signature that can be transformed into a wallet. So it’s not like Google signs on their behalf. It’s still a multi-factor authentication. And if they want a cold wallet or something, they can just transfer it to that particular way.

Very interesting. Are you going to be visiting Japan again sometime?

Yes, of course. So now I’m going to the Parliamentary Interpellation in 10 minutes… actually 5 minutes. And then this whole session runs till the end of May. So even if it extends a little bit, usually by mid-June, I’ll be able to travel until the end of August, because the session begins again in September. So during that time I can do extended travels.

So Japan Blockchain week, it’s end of June, beginning of July. So that might be a good time to come. There’ll be a lot of things going on. And I think that, you know, with your work, and also if we get lucky and we are able to move forward in Japan, I feel like maybe Taiwan and Japan are going to be the two countries that are using Blockchain the most for pro-social stuff for this period.

Leaving no one behind.

Yeah, leaving no one behind. And I think we can maybe, because what I want to do is I want to reset the sort of global agenda around this, to be focused more on the social impact and less on just… I think it’s important, the payment rails and the financing, but it’s going to happen anyway.

There are a lot of people already excited about it. And I think, in talking to even the Europeans, there are people now that are interested in it, but there’s not enough activity. So I think if we can amplify that, that would be great.

Very much so.

So thank you.

Thank you.