Audrey Tang: So this meeting will be on the record.

Lewis Freiberg: Sure.

Audrey Tang: Awesome. It’s a public chain.

Lewis Freiberg: Thank you. Sorry, I don’t have a card to give to you.

Audrey Tang: It’s fine.

Lman Chu: Right now, the foundation working with very interesting...like Lewis. Although, right now, he is working for the foundation, but he never meets the co-founder, the founders before...

Lewis Freiberg: I’ve never met...

Lman Chu: ...until now. Already there’s some very great work. Yesterday night, his work, we just released some data market for the IoT sensors, like I said for LASS. This morning already shows on the "Forbes" and the "Reuters" and the "New York Times." Yesterday night is a very great moment, because it’s almost 100 people, the town people, share the moment, and they are happy. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Congratulations.

Lman Chu: Yes, right now they aren’t happy to not get purely a very high awareness, even in Asia, especially in Taiwan. It’s the first meet up, and yesterday, we just need to face the attack from the Ethereum community today, having another successful meetup in Nangang tells about a ICO, that’s a topic where get people more interested. [laughs]

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

Lewis Freiberg: I think it was interesting though that Raiden went and did an ICO, then you have the talent kind of backing Oracle network which is not ICO, which is kind of interesting, [laughs] because you have this scaling problem then you’re like, "Ah, now there’s an ICO for the thing that’s meant to solve this problem, maybe we should just have something that’s..."

Audrey Tang: The Raiden Network?

Lewis Freiberg: Yeah, Raiden.

Audrey Tang: It’s like Lightning, right?

Lewis Freiberg: Yeah. Oh no, sorry, the Oracles, sorry.

Audrey Tang: Oh, the Oracles Network.

Lewis Freiberg: My bad. I completely messed that one up for you.

Audrey Tang: No, that’s fine.

Lewis Freiberg: There was an ICO for, I think, one of the Oracles, and then he went and funded another one, which was not ICO.

Audrey Tang: I see.

Lewis Freiberg: Sorry. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: No, this is fine. Where are you based?

Lewis Freiberg: I’m based in Melbourne at the moment, but we don’t really have any individual offices for our developers. We have...

Lman Chu: There’s one.

Lewis Freiberg: Oh, yeah.

Lman Chu: In Singapore.

Audrey Tang: There’s one in Singapore?

Lman Chu: It opened yesterday.

Light Lin: It opened last day.

Lewis Freiberg: But there’s no requirement for us to present at them, so there are developers all across the world, in Norway, at Berlin, Minsk, US, all sorts of staff, so it’s very distributed, and we’re working on distributed ledgers.

Lewis Freiberg: We have offices, like an innovation lab, so we just announced one in Singapore, LATTICE80, which is a Fintech hub. We have another one in Chicago with the Boston University. We’re working with some of the laboratories there, which is cool. Then, we also have our headquarters in Berlin.

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

Lewis Freiberg: We’re quite self-directed in how we work. We have a fairly flat structure. Everyone has their own roles. For me, my role was Platform Lead for the thing that was released last night. It was a little bit stressful doing the meet-up and then making sure that it went out smooth and making sure it didn’t go down and stuff.

Lewis Freiberg: I work on the tasks that I’m given, but my role is lead ecosystem developer, so I liaise with corporates and the community to be able to help them onboard with the technology. I write some libraries and stuff to help people get involved, but there are others who work on the cryptography, others who work on the core client, others who work on the networking and stability.

Lewis Freiberg: We all have our different areas, and we’re able to interact. If we need help or if something needs to be done, we all collaborate together. We found that works quite well. We have about 30 developers at the moment, and we’re scaling up.

Audrey Tang: Full-time developers?

Lewis Freiberg: Yeah, but only recently [laughs] we’ve been able to actually access the funding that we’ve been given. We’ve just got registered as a not-for-profit in Germany, which has very strict laws, and it took us about a year to get that through. What happened was, at the ICO there was the four co-founders, they said, "All of the tokens are up for sale."

Lewis Freiberg: None of it was reserved. None of it was pre-allocated, and then, they had to buy back what they wanted, [laughs] which is quite funny. I don’t think anyone has ever done that, [laughs] still to this day.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, I’ve never heard of it.

Lewis Freiberg: They did that, and then, from...

Audrey Tang: That reflects a certain philosophy, though.

Lewis Freiberg: Yeah, and you really see it in their communications. They’re not marketing people, they’re technology people, and it shows. You see [laughs] them in some of their interviews, and they swear a little bit. They’re themselves, though. They’re very true to the technology they want to bring forth.

Lewis Freiberg: They released all of the tokens. They had to buy their own back, and then, after they delivered the working product, they asked the community, "If you want our foundation to be able to, to, to build, and, and, and work with corporates and build community, um, we would like donations." They asked for donations of five percent of the total supply, and they received that from all of the initial investors.

Lewis Freiberg: They haven’t been able to access that until three weeks ago. That was about a year and a half with one arm tied behind their back, and they built this product, and now we’re kind of moving forward a lot better.

Audrey Tang: Awesome.

Light Lin: Does this all make sense to you?

Audrey Tang: 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.

Lman Chu: Until he will meet you, and the way he knew you by GitHub.

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

Lewis Freiberg: That’s great.

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

Lewis Freiberg: It’s permission-less.

Audrey Tang: It’s permission-less, right.

Lewis Freiberg: It doesn’t discriminate on any transaction value, so you know if you have a transaction that’s worth a million dollars or you have a transaction that’s worth zero, they’re both equal in the network. Anyone can participate and set up a full note, you just need to be able to peer with your neighbors.

Audrey Tang: It’s eventually time stamped?

Lewis Freiberg: Yeah. That’s a bit of an interesting one, given the architecture of our network. It’s a little bit harder. Little bit is an understatement. It’s harder to do time stamping, and with that, smart contracts, but there is an approach and it’s being worked on right now to be able to fix that issue.

Audrey Tang: 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 that CPU only, so it’s essentially the one CPU one vote, but it has to be Intel CPU in it.

Lman Chu: Yeah. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: 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.

Lewis Freiberg: Yeah. [laughs]

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

Lewis Freiberg: The IOTA originally came out of a hardware startup. That’s still going. It’s called Jinn Labs I think. Where the effects came from is they wanted to make the future of IoT and the machine economy in the truest sense of the word possible.

Lewis Freiberg: They were like, "We need new hardware because the current hardware is not working that well or we’ll not scale to the point we need." They’ve done something controversial, they’re looking at building ternary processors. Yeah, so everyone is like "Why are you doing this? What’s going on?" We have a very firm belief that this is the right move, and that this will have benefits in the future.

Lewis Freiberg: Given that, they’re looking at designing their chips, but also releasing some of the designs and the system that IOTA is built on is open source, so anyone who wants to use it is able to do so. We don’t really take any special partnerships or anything like this that the IOTA software is being re-written in C at the moment, so it’s down at the embedded level.

Lewis Freiberg: I don’t think there are any particular favorites we will play, [laughs] which is good, because you have manufacturers in China, in the US, and all these countries. They have their own interests, and they want to make sure that what they have is secure. Maybe having an Intel product may remove you from certain markets, which is not...

Audrey Tang: I see. That’s definitely true.

Audrey Tang: Why C, why not, say, Rust?

Lewis Freiberg: Actually, we tried Rust.

Audrey Tang: Oh, really?

Lewis Freiberg: Yeah, so our lead engineer on the core, he tried to do it, and then was building it, but he just got to the point where the memory management was getting a little bit annoying for him, so he he’s like, "No, fuck it." [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Maybe try again in three years then.

Lewis Freiberg: Yeah, when he gets it yeah, maybe a bit more.

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

Lman Chu: Actually, we in the almost past week, we already start up the conversation with several departments. Especially for the Taichung city government, I talked to the CIO, Mr. Hsiao Ching-Teng.

Lman Chu: They do their own research which said they do need some kind of a blockchain technology to help them solve the IoT management issues. They also heard about how we did for the last. Mr. Hsiao, he’s highly interested. They want to do some small research and a POC project inside the government. After that, they can release a good bid for the market.

Lman Chu: Before that, even that, they still want to know if there will be any possible. They want to talk to the central government and see how to allocate some coverage. Maybe not much fund, because they will lobby the more fund after the experiment, but they want to do the small experiment with not only IOTA, but all the other experiment holder for the IoT market.

Lman Chu: I think this is very good. It’s really a new a start. As the government, we will do the experiment first to know what’s the challenge and the possible difficulty, but not just bid by the price. For me, because I want to help this kind of good technology, especially in Asia, especially in Taiwan, because right now we have the policy said, "We want to be an island of IoT after 2025."

Lman Chu: If we did not do anything, we’re just full of hardware, but know inside some good things there. I think that it will be good if the government kind of the customer of the IoT. If you would just try to sell this idea to the vendors, as you know, they just don’t get it. [laughs] But it’s normal, because no customer tell them they needed that. That’s our culture.

Lman Chu: I think we can help the government to do some experiment. I’m not talking about they need to buy, they need to accept bidders. It’s illegal. I don’t like that.

Audrey Tang: OK, so we’re not going to be asked to enter the ICO, then?

Lewis Freiberg: Have you been asked this?

Audrey Tang: No.

Lman Chu: But I think it will be very great for the foundation. No matter for the foundation or for Taiwan, we can really let our people know, "Oh, yeah. It’s a very good way to do some technology experiment in first." Maybe -- I hope -- in the future, the government can do or locate some fund for this kind of experiment, not only in the research institution, but also in the local government or every site.

Lman Chu: Then they can really release a very good article to the market. I think that would be a very good way. Mr. Hsiao just asked me, he you know, I will talk to you. He also say central government, if they can support and help on this idea. The local government will easier to excuse that. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Sure.

Light Lin: Should we let Lewis to share some examples from Germany or maybe Singapore, the upcoming impact, since the office will be open, right? And the POCs you’re working with in Berlin, and maybe somewhere else. We can talk about how we want to do in Taiwan.

Lewis Freiberg: We have a number of different areas of focus, and a lot of these fall under the purview of IoT. One of the large ones is, as we’re German based, we also have a lot of connections with the auto industry there, their vehicles. We’ve been working with Volkswagen and a few other car manufacturers to be able to secure the data coming out of their vehicles.

Lewis Freiberg: Once you start to have autonomous vehicles and these sorts of things, you need to be able to have the data coming out of them. You need to have data coming out of them and interacting with their environment so that the parking sensors, the toll booths, the city traffic, the cars around them...

Light Lin: Basically, smart city, right?

Lewis Freiberg: Yeah. We want to have this device, this vehicle become its own actor, and then be able to interact. This is a manifestation of what we want. This is the realistic example of an individual device being able to interact with its environment. We want the same thing for the charge stations that they have.

Lewis Freiberg: Instead of having a centralized backbone, you use the IOTA network, and you’re able to transfer value and receive energy for that, at a very, very small scale. With the Taiwan example that was given with the LASS network.

Lewis Freiberg: Also with what we have just released with the data marketplace, we can demonstrate that IOTA is very useful in terms of securing and sending data through its network, but also being able to enable that to be queried, visualized. If you want a value transfer to happen, you can also enable that, which is quite cool.

Lewis Freiberg: In terms of what we’re doing, there’s a number of vehicle research happening in the office in Chicago. On the other side, we’re more looking in terms of fintech and some of the more smaller-scale transactions. We enable market transactions, because we don’t have fees, which is quite cool. That’s more the focus in Singapore.

Lewis Freiberg: In terms of what we’re looking to do in Asia, we have very good connections in Europe, and we have some connections in the United States, but we’re looking to set up more offices in North Asia. [laughs]

Light Lin: Can I take pictures?

Audrey Tang: Sure, sure. Of course, yeah.

Lman Chu: Also, I’m trying to discuss with III and ITRI. Right now, like I told you last time, we have some efforts try to start to have people -- young, good engineers -- who study for the distributed ledgers. I’m not sure if it’s crazy or not. Right now, you can see Ethereum, they have very good impression in Taiwan, no matter for what reason. It’s good.

Lewis Freiberg: Good marketing.

Lman Chu: It’s good, yeah. Once, if we can have another famous...because they’re all top-10 cryptocurrency technology for the market capital. If we can have another one have a good impression at all, I think, "Whoa, it’s very interesting." Especially they will make world have some special imagination. IOTA, they talked for the IoT.

Lman Chu: The people think Taiwan is island of hardware, then I think there will be a very good impact for all of Taiwan. Another meaning is that, "Hey, why?" Why that some top of the cryptocurrency foundation, they all try to come to Taiwan. If this is good or not, or even others should come to Taiwan, there will be some impact f for the regulation department, but I think it’s a good impact.

Lman Chu: I just have such images, "Yeah, let’s see what will happen." [laughs] That’s why, right now, I try to discuss with the III that is just...especially last week, I see some news that the Fintech park. I’m not sure...

Audrey Tang: Yeah, the Fintech lab.

Lman Chu: Yeah, yeah.

Audrey Tang: The Fintech lab... But you’re not marketing yourselves as a cryptocurrency?

Light Lin: No. You don’t read the news last week? Actually, the first lab in Asia is in Singapore’s Fintech hub.

Lewis Freiberg: The IOTA Foundation works on the technology for the Tangle, with is the architecture of the network and how it functions, but also the IOTA core. IOTA is the currency. There is a token on top of the network. The network can be used without the token, so it’s still good for that. It’s still a very good distributed ledger.

Lewis Freiberg: Additionally, the value that distributed ledgers allow for is money or value to transferred.

Light Lin: Lewis, could you share some idea about the differences between Tangle and blockchains at the Minister. Or do you already know that?

Audrey Tang: I’m very well aware of the technical level.

Light Lin: OK, no problem.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, there’s two core brandings going on. There’s the Fintech Sandbox Act, which enables all kinds of Fintech experimentations. You may or may not be considered a cryptocurrency. It doesn’t really matter. I just mention that because you just mentioned that is a cryptocurrency, but it carries a different notion here.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, we’re not outlawing anything, but we do view cryptocurrencies as something that really needs a little bit more attention, as opposed to just any other IoT distributed ledger technology, because of the possibility of money laundering. We’re trying very hard not to be seen internationally as a money-laundering place.

Audrey Tang: Whenever regulators see cryptocurrency, they think money laundering. I’m just trying to make sure that the current generation of IOTA technology is not adapted for money laundering as compared to IoT...

Lewis Freiberg: No, [laughs] it definitely isn’t. Like with any distributed ledger, you can do analysis, and you can follow transactions. It’s not on the level of a Zcash or a Monera, which is a bit more specialized in privacy. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Lewis Freiberg: Privacy, yeah. That’s an interesting way of looking at it. We understand that the technology we’re building isn’t in a vacuum. We want to make sure that we’re able to work with the regulators to ensure that this goes through correctly.

Lewis Freiberg: Especially in my country, in Australia, I don’t actually think they understand what technology is. [laughs] They’re legislators and they just put a very heavy hand on these issues. I think there needs to be more regulation, but it needs to be a balanced approach.

Lewis Freiberg: Being able to make sure that we can have this technology, have it used safely, without the risk of money laundering and stuff like that, to enable the value to be gained from distributed ledger, or more specifically the Tangle in IOTA, that can be realize.

Audrey Tang: Right. In the national government level, the flagship IoT project is the "Asia · Silicon Valley" project. I always pronounce the dot.

Audrey Tang: The idea here is not just the "Things" part. The "Internet of" part, the Io part, of course, is what the fund is really after. It takes three forms. One is direct subsidizing or sponsoring of local government projects, but it’s always kind of top-down. The top-down isn’t actually driven from within the national government. It’s from the special interest groups that informs the agency.

Audrey Tang: The ASVDA, the Asia·Silicon Valley Development Agency, is at arm’s length from the national government. They’re run by people who actually connect with Silicon Valley. They’ve identified a few key points, and one of it is IoT security. They’re currently very interested in any kind of IoT security projects. That’s one part.

Audrey Tang: The other part, of course, is Taiwania, which is a new investment fund. Taiwania was set up just specifically to invest in IoT, but they are still forming...

Light Lin: Yes, definitely.

Audrey Tang: It will take another few months, but once they’re there, they’re at two arms’ lengths from the national government, and they’ll be able to participate much more freely as a direct investor on ventures.

Audrey Tang: Between those, of course, there’s always the National Development Fund, which never invests as the largest or the sole investor. It’s always matching with other VCs.

Audrey Tang: I think, within those three programs, one need to position this technology appropriately. If it’s the first part, the smaller scale, easier to allocate subsidizing or sponsoring program, one would naturally ask, "Have you done any serious mathematical proof of how many nodes in IOTA network, once they’re compromised, compromise the whole network?"

Lewis Freiberg: Yeah. We’ve engaged in a lot of universities regarding the mathematical proofs regarding...There are two very different approaches. There’s one called SPECTRE, which is from an Israel university. They’re a DAG-based coin, so directed acyclic graph. They’re not ready yet. They’re still writing their paper, and they focus very much on trying to prove it as much as possible.

Lewis Freiberg: We have our white paper, we have more coming out, and we have more research being done. We are very much practical. We’re engineers. We want to build things, we test, we simulate, and we see how things work, rather than writing a paper and waiting. That will maybe take a year or two years, and then we build a product that will take another two years to build.

Lewis Freiberg: We do them concurrently, and we’re very careful in the research that we do and making sure that what we do does not affect the people who hold value in IOTA.

Audrey Tang: But have you hired, dedicated or otherwise sponsored a more practical penetration testing?

Lewis Freiberg: We’ve engaged some security research firms. We also have cryptographic researchers. We have lots of mathematicians dealing with the network security and attacks. In our white paper, we outline a number of attacks and how they’re possible.

Lewis Freiberg: There is a large prize if you are able [laughs] to attack the network. I think it’s $2.7 billion that there’s possibly at stake, and we get attacked every second day. People are trying to figure out how to penetrate the network. To answer your question, yes, we are actively making sure that what we are building is secure for the future.

Lewis Freiberg: Even over and above that, in terms of a practical sense, for the individuals using the IoT products, what the Data Market demonstrates is our masked authenticated messaging platform, which enables symmetrically encrypted message streams that are fully secret.

Lewis Freiberg: That means that you can publish streams, sell access, change keys. It’s based on Merkle trees, which is really cool. There’s lots and lots of things we can do with that, and that’s one of the most powerful modules that we have.

Lman Chu: As you mentioned the market, I wanted to share some of the data market. Actually, I see the opportunity from the data market. This is a sensor map, just launched yesterday, from the foundation. Currently the data sensor only resides in Europe and maybe Australia, because...

Light Lin: ...just the very beginning. Then I see the opportunities from Taiwan. There is none, none.

Audrey Tang: Mm-hmm.

Light Lin: When we can open...

Lewis Freiberg: This is what it looks like, and then you have your sensor map here. These are different companies in Germany. Then we have all the sensors down here. These are the companies we’re partnered with.

Lman Chu: Since we’re doing less project about app quality so we can actually add more nodes on the map.

Lewis Freiberg: We’re partnered with a number different...I think there are number of different universities that are involved in this. The last system that is being... NCKU...

Light Lin: NCTU.

Lewis Freiberg: Yeah, that one. [laughs] I always get the acronym mixed up. They’re looking at integrating masked authenticated messaging. While I haven’t been able to share the code with them yet to put the sensor on the network, I think it will be very trivial for them to be able to join.

Lewis Freiberg: We have other universities, and so we’ll be able to get them on board, as well. Maybe we’ll have some more sensors in Asia Pacific, which would be nice.

Lman Chu: We should open up our data and provide to the world, and then use by the world.

Audrey Tang: But we already do that, just to put on the IOTA ledger. There’s more contracts.

Audrey Tang: Once you have time stamps, once you have computation consensus on the transactional order, or whatever. Are you actually looking to building that?

Lewis Freiberg: Yes, yes, but our approach for smart contracts or for create execution environments is related to oracles. We look at oracles and we think that’s the way to go. A lot of the systems, they work in a vacuum. You have some data coming from the network, and then it just works within the network.

Lewis Freiberg: But we believe that we want to achieve a system where, instead of saying, "I want to pay a thousand IOTAs for something," we say, "OK, I want to pay five cents for something." That could be in Taiwan dollars, in US dollars, and we will provide the mechanisms through these oracles to be able to have the system say, "Yeah, five cents," but the settlement layer is in our in-over.

Lewis Freiberg: The contract gets executed and is able to do those calculations. We understand that the technology is very foreign, in the sense that it’s like, "What is an IOTA? What’s an Ether?" It’s very abstract in concepts. I think that’s the problem with this space a little bit, in the sense that there’s all of this technology, it’s great, and there’s all of these really interesting tools.

Lewis Freiberg: But, for people who aren’t you and me and these in the room, it’s very hard to say, "OK, now here is this token." They’re like, "What do I do with it? How do I use it?" We want to make sure that we make it as friendly as possible for individuals and allow the tools for developers to be able to hide it if they need to, which is good.

Audrey Tang: Early days, before the World Wide Web, people still ask, "What’s an Internet packet?" or, "What’s TCP?"

Audrey Tang: "It’s the same thing, right?"

Lman Chu: Yeah, now you can join the development.

Audrey Tang: Seriously, of course we’ll take a look, code-wise, but I’m just looking at the angles. The IoT secure storage, Tangle, is different from the Fintech cryptocurrency IOTA...

Lman Chu: Yeah, yeah.

Audrey Tang: ...which also has a smart contract angle. It’s difficult for the national government to simultaneously think it is a new cryptocurrency, and it’s also an IoT ledger product. What’s the angle that the ITRI people are looking at?

Lman Chu: Actually, they just listened to Jim. [laughs] They realize this is an expertise from Jim. He tried to make the same proxy mechanism. It is his specialty, and he have several successes write about that. He called this a kind of a special hypervisor, protect all the privacy into the same proxy.

Audrey Tang: I’m aware of his work.

Lman Chu: Because I’m hard to talk too much technical detail, but he just tell me, "You just read the white paper of Apple iOS, the security white paper, that you will know what’s going on." [laughs] He says same thing doing. He wants to contribute for the IOTA.

Lman Chu: Because it will be reasonable, this, maybe every IOTA device you have, its own wallet, considerable wallet to protect all the privacy and the identification, so it may be another approach for the trust communication, but instead of the security. This is my explanation.

Audrey Tang: Instead of security?

Lewis Freiberg: Alongside.

Audrey Tang: Alongside security. [laughs]

Lman Chu: Yeah. [laughs]

Lewis Freiberg: The tools that we’re building, so we have our value transfer software, which is you’re able to say, "I want to send a transaction on the network," and there’s the functionality for that, but there is also using the same sort of private key. You’re able to also send transactions and create MAM streams, and all this type of stuff as well, which is...

Lman Chu: We do have another favor, if you can help?

Audrey Tang: Mm-hmm.

Lman Chu: Because I’m not really the guy who knows how to talk to the government very well, so us fortunately have some friends to help me. If you want to talk about such of the technology issues, maybe BOST, they suggest me should talk to Executive Secretary Tsai...

Audrey Tang: I see.

Lman Chu: Before, I know Executive Secretary Kuo very well. His office just beside Chu’s, so I really do know him, but no, after that, I don’t have any contact in BOST now, but I delight to have some sharing this discussion with them, for the technology, and for the impact, but I don’t try to persuade them, "Hey, you should trust IOTA." It’s your choice.

Lman Chu: I just wanted to have of this conduct disputed later, would you consider it about, because it more important than just highway. It might be a role of government, because government have the two roles. One is government. Second is we are the big customer for the public sector IoT, so we need to know what’s best for us as a personal customer view.

Lman Chu: Maybe I’m not sure if it’s simple for you or not, but if it is OK, we’d like to have some of your meeting with them.

Light Lin: Maybe we can be looped into your current blockchain discussions, then the public-private discussion can form around IoT...

Audrey Tang: As far as I know, the only blockchain-related email loop that I am in is receiving the Asia·Silicon Valley bi-weekly report.

Light Lin: That’s good enough.

Lewis Freiberg: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: I don’t think the BOST is looking at any particular protocol at the technical level, though. The BOST is the board that determines the science and technology funding for the administration. Of course, Director Tsai knows a lot about this, as he came from the Asia·SV office.

Audrey Tang: His new role in the BOST, I think is not to directly specify smart city protocols or things like that. It’s mostly to allocate sufficient funding toward defining the security properties and related regulations, and things like that that’s required to make this kind of application level things happen, as well as ensuring the infrastructure level is trustworthy.

Audrey Tang: The actual work in improving, or at least experimenting, with those technologies and making sure they’re secure, mostly lies in either experimentally in the Asia·SV, or in production — that would be our cybersecurity department.

Audrey Tang: I don’t think the tech is ready to be sent straight to the cybersecurity department. It’s still evolving, right?

Lewis Freiberg: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: Or do you want to have snapshot version of this, and tested by Taiwan’s white-hat hackers? We can do that, too.

Lman Chu: Actually, I think I mentioned the last time we meet, we are looking at like open fork or some edge computing, even another new alliance called Trust the IoT Alliance.

Lman Chu: They used the word trust in IoT, but not security. They are using the blockchain as a protocol layer, maybe under the layer stream in layer two and try to as a trusted protocol for the future IoT, so yeah, it’s evolved. Yes, that’s also my perspective we should participate more aggressive or we just only follow the result. The finish, it’s cannot make us a real item of IoT. We just follow IoT.

Audrey Tang: Well, we have PhDs and professors contributing to Hyperledger and to the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance...

Lman Chu: Alliance.

Audrey Tang: So it’s not like we don’t make contributions.

Lman Chu: Sure, sure.

Audrey Tang: What you’re really saying is that we’re not participating in the governance, steering the direction, and things like that, right? It’s this level of participation that you’re mentioning? I’m seeing a lot of IoT adoption of blockchain technology, but as a distributed ledger, not as...

Lewis Freiberg: As a EIO.

Audrey Tang: Right, and of course, IOTA clears faster, and things like that. The technical advantages are pretty obvious, but what it lacks, of course, first is a clear comparison table.

Audrey Tang: Second, is the kind of assurance that it...because both the Hyperledger stuff and the Enterprise Ethereum stuff relies on the fact that if this is not trustworthy, people like 10 times or 100 times larger than theirs at stake will suffer greatly, so it’s kind of a deference to their capabilities.

Lewis Freiberg: Where we’re going in terms of the foundation, what we’re looking at doing is setting up an alliance, similar to the Ethereum Alliance that will have corporates and individuals being able to be involved.

Lewis Freiberg: We’re looking with the new architecture that we’re building for the core client, looking at having it sort of enterprise-ready, being able to have all of the required modules to enable that functionality to happen. In terms of reassurances and security, we’re continuing research into that area, and we’re aggressively following that, but we only recently are able to access the full funding. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: It’s not like you can suddenly convince MasterCard to...

Lewis Freiberg: Yeah, and because of that, the amount of interviews we’ve had with new developers and stuff that we need to bring on board, because we’ve been at capacity for the last how many months, because we haven’t been able to access the 60 or 80 million dollars that we have for funding.

Lewis Freiberg: The Data Marketplace was the first one, and we actually had PR on that, which was nice, because we haven’t been able to engage a PR company.

Lman Chu: Finally. [laughs]

Lewis Freiberg: We’re starting to gain momentum, and this is very good for us, and we want to make sure that we do it right, and we pick up the right developers. We engage the community in the correct way, and we also make sure that we get that security right.

Light Lin: How many people are in the foundation?

Lewis Freiberg: There’s 30 at the moment.

Audrey Tang: 30 full time.

Lewis Freiberg: But we’re...

Lman Chu: Then it evolved before the foundation finally set up, so I think from now on, that the speed will increase.

Lewis Freiberg: Definitely. We’ve got a lot of networking guys coming on. We have a lot more...The area that I’m in is ecosystems, so we do a lot of the front facing for some of the community developers, the work there, so I’m looking to get more able to help me.

Lewis Freiberg: It’s been a bit stressful in coming here, and I was in Beijing before, Hong Kong, and now I’m here. Then we had the product launches, and it’s kind of my responsibility while also doing these little meetings and the speaking. Hopefully we’ll have more people to support, so we are not spread so thin, which is good.

Audrey Tang: I think HR more than anything at this point is where we can help, right?

Lewis Freiberg: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: You mentioned at NCKU, there is just Jim, or is there a lab?

Lman Chu: Right now, Jim finally can have a lab, since he’s...

Lman Chu: ...I think, an assistant professor. Finally, he from the profession to assistant professor lab, so it’s good. Yeah, we do have a lab, and right now we also align with the NCTU, and actually NTU. We already have Professor Liao’s support to have his Taiwanese students to join the government.

Lman Chu: There will be good persons prospective in some very good projects. It will inspire the young engineer, and this area is not special like you. When you were young, you made a lot of contributions...

Audrey Tang: Yeah.

Lman Chu: Yes, you’re still young.

Lman Chu: When you participated into the open source projects, all driven by the interests.

Audrey Tang: Well, it’s also funded by Apple and many other companies...

Lman Chu: But in the other way, no matter how young you are, if you participated into some good project, especially for cryptocurrency, you will get a reward in the beginning. Not until maybe you have done something that people would tell you.

Lman Chu: Make people have another contribution in a golden era. If you are really doing the technology or you are a gate, then you can have something different. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Certainly. For Professor Liao’s lab, it’s just his master students, or...?

Light Lin: Professor Liao, I cannot ask him to fully commitment. It’s not right. I just said, "OK, you can have some diverse approach." They also agreed they need to understand kind of the Tangle ecosystem.

Audrey Tang: So it’s mostly Jim, and some NCTU or NTU students?

Lman Chu: Yes.

Light Lin: Yeah.

Lewis Freiberg: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: This alliance is essentially a virtual lab for Jim?

Light Lin: From NTU, from Professor Liao’s lab it is alliance.

Lman Chu: Yes, and I asked them to join the collaboration, I work with ITRI and III. We try to make the young talent as a co-member to help the foundation to do work worth something, and later, because right now, already several corporations they want to join the way like the Linaro, they will send engineers with maybe with 30 percent capacity.

Lman Chu: At first, we need some young talent they can have more commitment and on the subject, then we can spread the good impact to outside. That’s my way to build a community and purpose.

Lewis Freiberg: Second to that, while we’re working with a number of large corporates and universities, and getting these partnerships, we also have another fund that is available to us to distribute it out to.

Light Lin: Because it’s a fund, right?

Lewis Freiberg: An ecosystem, yeah. We have about 22 TI, whatever that means, where at current process, it’s about like 30 million, I think, or a little bit less, and that’s for very small, so in the tens of thousands, where allocations to individuals to be able to build products, given that they have a good track record with their code, and for products that they want to build.

Lewis Freiberg: We’re looking for maybe at the governance around that, and we’ve just recently got a fund manager, so we’re able to start to get that moving and get people involved, and have these projects being worked on. Maybe the universities are able to apply for these grants. We really want to build the tooling. We want to build projects and have people be able to utilize the Tangle.

Lewis Freiberg: This is why you have the big companies that have the markets and the verticals, they’re great. They may be integrating IOTA, but we also want to have the industries that don’t exist yet. We want to have the person in a small town, behind a computer, being able to have the same impact that somebody who’s working in a large company has, so we will try to enable that.

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

Lewis Freiberg: Our website is horrible.

Audrey Tang: 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?"

Lewis Freiberg: I have been a vocal opponent of our current website. It is very unclear. It has a lot of graphs, but not a lot of text. We are getting that re-done, which is very good, and we need that.

Audrey Tang: 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...

Lewis Freiberg: We need to be able to distinguish ourselves from them...?

Audrey Tang: Yeah.

Lewis Freiberg: That makes sense. I’ll look to get that information out there, because at present, I don’t think we have the, "We are this versus this, this, and this."

Lman Chu: Yes.

Audrey Tang: 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 look at the Ethereum space anyway," and things like that. It’s checklists that they can do themselves.

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

Lewis Freiberg: Oh yeah, because we say, "Oh, we have a IOTA," and they’re like, "What is that?" We’re like, "Well, it’s really good," and they’re like, "OK, show me." [laughs] You’re like, "Well, we don’t a list yet," so we’ll get the list. We’ll make it.

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

Lewis Freiberg: Like why does it need to be distributed and secured, and stuff? Which is a very interesting concern, because a lot of the applications you see these days like ICOs, and you’re just like, "Just get a replicated database."

Audrey Tang: Right. I’ve also worked with PostgreSQL replication technologies.

Lewis Freiberg: You’re like, "What?" That’s pretty funny.

Audrey Tang: 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.

Lewis Freiberg: I think a good approach would be we’ve engaged in educational creatives, though, they’re very good at building little demo that individuals can use, even, so we’re looking to go from the person on the street, to the person who is the businessman, then the IT, then the developer interested in cryptocurrency, then like mathematician-level.

Lewis Freiberg: We’re looking to get all of that information, so that for anyone who is interested, they can understand. While the description may not be so accurate at the top, we will try and make it so as they might understand more.

Audrey Tang: 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 is still is a long way to go from any kind of distributed governance model that we’re looking at a proper infrastructure.

Lewis Freiberg: In terms of how we are looking in terms of the technology that we are building, we want to get to a point where IOTA is a standardized protocol. We want to make sure that the technology, itself, and everybody contributing to the network...

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

Lewis Freiberg: Yeah, we’re partnering with the standard organizations from Germany. I’m not involved in that process, but I can maybe get some more information on that. Our end goal is to have this as the backbone of IoT and to communication.

Audrey Tang: I’m aware of that.

Lewis Freiberg: Because of that, it’s nice to say, but if we’re not actually actioning any standardization then what are we doing? We’re going down that route to try and make sure that we are able to have these situations where there are these structures, that things happen, and there are no kind of recourse.

Lewis Freiberg: We want to make sure we have a clear way of dealing with these things, and when we’re writing these documents out.

Audrey Tang: 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.

Audrey Tang: 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.

Lewis Freiberg: Yeah, you can’t just have something be like, "Oh, it changed on Tuesday." [laughs] You need to have something standard.

Audrey Tang: 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.

Audrey Tang: 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.

Audrey Tang: 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.

Lewis Freiberg: Wonderful, thank you so much. Very good.

Audrey Tang: Cheers.

Lewis Freiberg: Thank you.

Audrey Tang: Keep up the good work.

Lewis Freiberg: Thank you.