We also, then, identified two things that Facebook must do, they must improve their report mechanism for fake advertisements. They also must educate the users how to connect legitimate sellers into the advertisements. They must join the local business association in order to do a multi-stakeholder consultation with the business ...

We basically harness the protestors and invite them into the national government in order to make maps like this.

This is a new kind of scam. The related ministries, there’s about seven of them. We get everybody in the same room, the NGOs, the social enterprise that purposely try to fix this problem, the local associations, and due the user journey that basically identifies all the touch points and ...

For example, it sells a hard disk, but it actually corrupts after you write the first megabyte, or something, and then it gets very difficult to return this issue. All the customer service, the customer would discover that they are actually automated bots, or whatever.

For example, when Facebook came to Taiwan a lot of people used Facebook, but in recent months there was an issue of Facebook having those scam accounts that purposely sell some goods. It’s a pay on delivery, but once you pay it on delivery, you find out that it’s actually ...

Once the people solve it, everybody else, the other, unrelated ministries also understand, "OK, so this problem is to be resolved in this kind of way." For issues that related to digital economy, we usually make a mind map, which is coming up any moment now.

The different regional cities’ social enterprises, the innovators, they gather around me. It’s just me that travels. Everybody else remains in Taipei, but we still have good videoconference and transcription that makes it very easy to see the local problems being surfaced and being resolved in a very quick fashion, ...

I also tour every two weeks to all the four different regional offices in Taiwan to have a high bandwidth -- and we’re setting up 360 and VR livestreaming -- connection to the Taipei Social Innovation Lab. All the ministry related to social enterprise, about eight of them, are sitting ...

It’s easier for the ministers to work with social enterprises and NGOs, because their missions are aligned with the government in order to solve social issues. It’s much harder for any purely for-profit company to get treatment like this.

Anyone can come to me and say, "We’re solving a local SDG issue. We’re running into this regulation problem." Within a week, because everything is transcribed, they will receive a written response from any ministries that’s related to their cause and try to solve the issues.

Every Wednesday I work outside of the administration on a local Social Innovation Lab, here in Taipei. My office hour’s 10:00 AM to 10:00 PM.

Those may also run into existing regulations. They may also be in the grey area whether it’s OK to set up this or not. We promise to solve the problem for the local problem solvers.

For this kind of thing the national government is much too slow. We allocate budget every year, but new social problems arise every other week. It falls to the local NGOs and local social enterprises to surface the local issues and design innovative ways to address those issues.

On the inclusion part, we also rely on the local NGOs and local social enterprises, I’m also the minister in charge of social enterprise design. The idea is that many of those inventions, they’re not aimed just to earn or a profit, or not even chiefly earn to a profit, ...

We try to make the innovation led by the private sector, instead of having the government dictating where to innovate and how to innovate, which is a lost cause, anyway.

This is actually easier than if we start to allow them in the first place, because the society will already have had a dialogue on the digital economy and its impact on the new technology.

If it’s a good idea and passes the experimentation, then it’s up to the ministers. Now they have to adjust the regulation in order to make this kind of new operation a legal kind of operation to happen.

Once this experimentation period ends, the society, the sociologists, the local people doesn’t like it. It’s a failure, but at least it paid the tuition for everybody else, or it’s a good idea.

Nevertheless, they would ask the FSC, the Financial Supervisory Commission, to say, "OK, we will not ban or regulate you for six months, or for a year or something, but in exchange you must protect, of course, still, privacy and consumer protection." You also release the experimental method of a ...

One of the ideas is the FinTech sand box, where any blockchain or other inventors can say, "OK, we’re going to set up an operation that doesn’t quite look like a bank and doesn’t quite look like any other existing financial instrument."

Also, because our legal system is similar to the German law system, it is a more fixed code system, so we’re now also trying to make room in our law for sandboxing.

They may be about local issue. They may be about national issue, like Uber. It doesn’t really matter. As long as 5,000 people want to talk about it, we talk about in a cross-ministerial way. That’s the governance part.

We have one of the most advanced e-petition systems, where literally every other week we talk about any issue that was surfaced by more than 5,000 people. They may be a redesign of the tax filing system. They may be about fishing and marine park management.

We’re also looking to modernize our own governmental methods to be, instead of discuss a bunch of people every four years, and give power to those people for four years, we aim to have a reasonable discussion on any and all policy issues.

We’re now down to the last three or four percent of population who doesn’t have broadband Internet access. We allocated a special budget to make that happen. About three years from now we aim to have 100 percent Internet accessibility for everybody, basically. That’s the "D"evelopment in DIGI of infrastructure ...

The parts that the government can do is, of course, providing a stable infrastructure. Our current president ran with a platform of broadband Internet as human right, which is actually easier to achieve here in Taiwan because of the topology to the geographic connectivity.

I’m the digital minister, but I work with all the different ministries. There is 32 -- recently 31, but very soon 32 -- of ministries here in Taiwan. The idea is very simple, because we see the digital development as an issue that requires...Here, this is the architecture. The plan ...

A brief introduction of my role. I’m called digital minister without portfolio, meaning that there is no digital ministry.

Yeah, of course, please do.

Yes. Please do. I am Audrey, just call me Audrey. Should we just briefly introduce ourselves, and if there anything I can help with, or I can answer, feel free to ask.

Keep up the good work.

Cheers.

I do think the current materials are not ready for the BOST level or the cybersecurity department level, because there’s no standard document, per se, to do a thorough check. It’s very much in development. We do have some policy levers for things that are still in development, too.

I look forward to the comparison charts, tables, and so on, then if there’s anything that I can do to introduce you to the Asia·SV folks, I’ll do my best.

Right, exactly. I think that’s all I have. We’ll clear out this transcript and publish it. That will save you some time when explaining to any other people.

As you said, the goodwill at first, but practically, as you move more forward as a new standard, or whatever, that will be of increasing importance.

I’m sure Jim and his lab is also pretty acquainted with the RFC process, and if there’s anything we can help that would be also helpful as well.

I’m aware of that.

By that, you mean you’re writing RFCs and going through the standardization process?

Vitalik is pretty good at that. I think the main thing I have when Vitalik visited, and we also had this talk that is recorded, I mostly worry about the bus factor, and about the governance model, because that was just after the DAO fork. The vote that they did ...

From your white paper, I do think there’s a unique position that you’re in between replicated DBs and full blockchains, but that value proposition I think need to be made clear to technical people, on the normal IT sense and not the cryptocurrency sense.

Right. I’ve also worked with PostgreSQL replication technologies.

Also, of course on the other side, how’s it different from replicating databases? [laughs]

It will be useful also for Mr. Hsiao to convince his colleagues.

I’ve tried to read your white paper, and that makes some sense to me. But for a perspective from a user, what they would want to know is that, "OK, instead of 15 seconds, this can clear in 3 seconds," or "If we don’t want this property, we shouldn’t be ...

Yeah.

It’s kind of the prerequisite before you talk, not even with BOST, but with ASVDA or any other agencies. Because there are already like dozens of committed projects working on Hyperledger and Enterprise Ethereum, so to justify more experimental funds, one needs to distinguish...

OK. Are there any checklists that says, "If you satisfy this, this, and this, you should use IOTA instead of Enterprise Ethereum as a ledger?"

I haven’t checked your website very deeply, but I don’t...

This alliance is essentially a virtual lab for Jim?