Cool. Anything I can help? It’s a fascinating technical project.

Maybe try again in three years then.

Oh, really?

Why C, why not, say, Rust?

I see. That’s definitely true.

What’s your stance on eventually trusting a hardware manufacturer?

Like recent three years. [laughs] The Hyperledger people are pretty committed to at least look into that approach, because it’s a solution to time stamping problem that requires like nothing in the architecture level, but the one has to kind of trust Intel.

I’ve just read that the Intel has some special instructions called proof of elapsed time, PoET, where it use like a special enclave in their recent CPUs, like the recent three years, or something. That has a special unit of cryptographically attestation, of a certain time as it elapsed for ...

It’s eventually time stamped?

It’s permission-less, right.

So is this going to evolve into a permissioned network, or remains a permission-less network?

Sure, sure. I’m still committing to GitHub like literally every other day or something.

Of course, yeah. I’ve always been working like that, like in the Perl 6 community, I’ve never really met Larry Wall or other developers until like two years into the process.

Awesome.

That reflects a certain philosophy, though.

Yeah, I’ve never heard of it.

Full-time developers?

Awesome. What’s your governance model? I’m very curious.

There’s one in Singapore?

No, this is fine. Where are you based?

I see.

No, that’s fine.

Oh, the Oracles Network.

It’s like Lightning, right?

The Raiden Network?

All their new developments are funded by ICO, essentially. [laughs]

Congratulations.

It’s fine.

Awesome. It’s a public chain.

So this meeting will be on the record.

Yeah, we have a lot of interns also working remotely, in all corners of Taiwan, helping to fix all the websites of the national government of the different ministries. We’re now looking at their work results.

Nah, I think it’s all very good questions. We’re good. Thank you so much.

I’m very used to working remotely. I don’t think that I’m returning to Taiwan. I’m mostly now just focusing on Taiwan. My work pattern has always been the same.

When people in Silicon Valley wake up, we at least have one hour of stand-up meeting time to work together. But it also means I don’t get dragged into meetings that are unnecessary because I’m physically just not there.

This is one I think the national border doesn’t really make any difference. The only thing that makes difference is the time zone difference, is about jet lagging. It’s about coordinating my sleep cycles so I can stay awake a little bit past midnight.

About seven months or eight months a year, I’m actually based in Taiwan and using video conference, using robotics, using other telepresence tools to work with my counterparts in the Silicon Valley and also in London and other European places.

When I worked with Silicon Valley companies before I joined the Cabinet for eight years, physically and mostly in Taiwan actually. I travel to US to meet my colleagues and so on from time to time.

I think everyone is born a hacker, in the sense that one has curiosity of all the system involved. Sometimes the educational school system kills the curiosity as the child is growing up, but otherwise I think people with their natural curiosity are natural hackers.

We go to Hengchun. We go to Penghu. We go to all those remote places when petitions about the remote issue so that a local fishers people and so on, they can participate personally.

Sometime it’s not really national. It is a local issue such as the remote island about the Marine National Park. We all fly there to have our meeting there because otherwise it will widen the digital divide. People who cannot travel to Taipei or people who are not so good ...

We invite the petitioners to the national government to have a face to face brainstorming session for five hours and then take the result of that brainstorming to the Prime Minister and other ministers’ portfolio so that we can form policy based on people’s input directly and very quickly.

We also internally vote. Every ministry has a vote about what kind of cross-ministry issue they want to talk about this month. The ones with the highest votes gets the help from the third party facilitators, from the expert researchers, and so on.

My main work after joining the Cabinet is to establish this virtual team of participation offices so that the cross-ministries issues are collectively handled by the six or seven different ministries together and to, like pieces in a puzzle, try to talk face to face with the things the petition ...

It is very difficult for any one ministry to answer for that whole petition. Sometimes they explains the problem and say, "OK, we can do 10 percent of the work, but the other p-, 90 percent is out of our hands."

If one petition for example about misinformation on Facebook or scam bots selling fake goods on Facebook, this actually involves the Ministry of Finance, of Economy, of Transport, of National Communication, of everybody.

One year ago, when I joined the Cabinet, there was a problem. Because when the petition was just for one ministry, the ministry knows very well how to answer it. It was often handled pretty well.

Any time there is an e-petition that is countersigned by 5,000 people or more, every ministry will meet and make sure that the right ministry take charge of the petition issues. This has been true since two years ago.

The idea of using e-petitions is that it brings awareness to the national government of the social issues or environmental issues that we may have overlooked but the people are caring very much about.

I think this is a natural thing that, during the digital convergence, different interested parties will take different stands on net neutrality. I think it is very important to have a informed dialogue. But I really don’t know personally about the US government’s stance on this matter.

I think net neutrality is very interesting, in the sense that different people on the different part of the value chain tends to think of it either as a liberating force or a constricting force, depending on whethere you work on: the content layer, the transmission layer, or in some ...