Tela Network

New Post: Presidential Tweet Mode https://www.linkedin.com/posts/stjohnpiano_at-solidi-in-preparation-for-international-activity-7334138828607139840-WdYX Mood music: Just Like You Imagined, by Nine Inch Nails https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6P_YISMJ4sQ Excerpt from Housing Is Both a Product and an Investment, by Michael Magoon https://substack.com/home/post/p-136980783 Housing is unusual because it is both a consumer product and an investment. Most products that you buy on the market depreciate rapidly after the initial purchase. This makes them extremely poor investments. When a person buys a home, however, they are not only purchasing a place to live. They are also purchasing an investment that can potentially accrue more value over time. For many homeowners, their house is their most substantial investment. ... This places the financial interests of homeowners in direct conflict with those who do not own homes.

Chuck Prince, Citigroup CEO, 2007: 'As long as the music is playing, you've got to get up and dance. We're still dancing. When the music stops, in terms of liquidity, things will be complicated.’ ---- I see that happening in front of my eyes with AI. Companies are developing internal chatbots at great expense; employees are getting CoPilot licences. At the same time, I hardly use it. I hardly see a need for it. Outputs are unreliable, and require so much reviewing you're often quicker writing it yourself. The uses of gen AI, in my professional experience, don’t come close to justifying the investment that’s put into it. And the time invested in compulsory training programmes. But… everyone else is doing it. All the big companies, all the big professional services firms. The music is playing. And we have to dance. And when the music stops playing we will look like idiots.

On 2025-07-18, Tela Network purchased 0.00006836 Bitcoin for 0.00000606 million GBP, at a price per coin of 87,576.29 GBP ($117,468.50). Explanation: This is a (very) small-scale version of Microstrategy's Bitcoin investment strategy. We take it quite seriously, however, and it's likely to be an interesting journey. 👉 Follow Tela Network on LinkedIn: https://lnkd.in/dUEVryNw

/ The state functionally went bankrupt, and was dissolved in what amounts to essentially a corporate-sovereign restructuring. Starting in the 1970s and accelerating thereafter, the Soviet growth model - extensive capital accumulation poured into new urban factories, power plants, steel mills, and machine tools - had effectively run out of low-hanging investment opportunities, resulting in persistently diminishing marginal growth potential. / A total lack of ... creative destruction on one side, and ballooning imperial obligations on the other. / To paper over these holes, the Soviet Union financed its civilian consumption and military spending - along with the subsidies it paid to its puppets - through oil rents made possible by the global energy crisis of the 1970s. But when oil prices normalized again in the mid-1980s, the regime was forced onto international debt markets, where it was eventually strangled. / https://boydinstitute.org/p/debt-killed-the-soviet-empire

Bob Nystrom wrote a famous post entitled "What Color is Your Function?" - https://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2015/02/01/what-color-is-your-function/ It discussed the tension in software between how sync and async functions behave. A new category of data is emerging that I call "purple". This is produced by LLMs. The property is transferable. Any data or function that uses LLM-generated data is purple, and any data or function based on the same is also purple. Keeping track of AI provenance is crucial going forward, as is providing checks on the data produced by purple functions. So, I present a new approach: https://llmsmr.io It summarises text using an LLM, but also provides tools to quickly check the result by extracting direct quotes and presenting them to the user. The summary is purple, but the quotes can be verified simply to ensure that they do indeed appear in the original text. I believe this approach should be applied to all purple data going forward.

In inflation-adjusted terms, the cost of a house in Bozeman has tripled in the last twenty-five years; young working-class kids who grew up there can no longer afford to buy a house in the town they grew up in. They either wait to inherit property, pay outrageous rents, live in a camper — or leave. This has had the effect of ‘cutting off’ the continuity of the culture there; the Bozeman “old-guard” now finds itself diminished, steadily replaced by the new generation of largely ex-urban newcomers who have effectively ‘colonized’ the town. Moreover, even if a young Bozemanian (Bozemanite?) can situate himself in a decent housing scenario — his town is now a sprawling, traffic-choked version of what it was when he was a kid. The construction is endless; there are hundreds, if not thousands of people now living on the streets there in RV’s, vans, and campers. https://substack.com/home/post/p-175627800

" This laying down of your life to do a difficult thing, in an act which has got integrity - is culture. And that's what the invitation always is: to do a brave thing. From the front of your property to the back, and from the start of your life to the end. To make a grand gesture. A simple, uncomplicated, grand gesture. That's culture. And the opposite of it is slavery and debt. And there's this great tilt that needs to happen. It starts on the very small scale, with this little tiny patch of land. My life. My family. That's how conquest happens. " - James Gillick, "The Grand Gesture: Reviving Sacred Art, Craft, and Culture" (~01:23:26), The New Humanum. James Gillick is an English figurative artist. Link to the full film on YouTube: https://youtu.be/96J2RIQLvC4?

"The credential that establishes someone as real is the ability to supply CPU power." - Satoshi https://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2008-November/014860.html He is referring to identity within the Bitcoin mining system. It occurs to me that: In the political world, the credential that establishes someone as real is the ability to supply violence. This violence may be direct or delegated, wide or limited, open or hidden, embraced or disavowed, demanded or inspired, but it must. be. present. In the same way that Bitcoin mining ignores all identities other than those that supply CPU power, politics ignores all identities other than those that supply physical force. On top of Bitcoin mining, we can build addresses, transactions, identities, property rights, immutable publishing, and secure communication. On top of violence, we can build towns, cities, temples, polities, law courts, houses, families, and futures. But: Without a foundation, nothing can stand.

Hi, I'm StJohn Piano. Positions: - CTO @ Solidi Cryptocurrency Exchange - Blockchain Advisor @ Tela Network I'm English / American, living in Valencia, Spain since 2021. I began working in blockchain technology in 2014. I've built storage tools, publishing systems, tradebots, smart contracts, and payment processors. I also developed a blog platform that used blockchain to timestamp every article, making it unalterable. I wrote there extensively about blockchain and its consequences. Link: http://edgecase.net Previously, I worked in speech recognition, robotics, and engineering simulations. I read a lot of history and appear regularly on the Tela Network Podcast. LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/stjohnpiano Substack: https://networktheory.substack.com Github: https://github.com/sj-piano Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@TelaNetworkPodcast

There are eras of media, and each era has its own rules for how to craft an effective message. / There was a time when brands or individuals could rely on the organic reach of their efforts, but the pay-to-play model has been standard for years. / There exist several networks which gather freelancers to produce and distribute podcast clips. / There are of course creators who achieve this by partnering with a talent agency offering essentially the same services under the hood. / Creators can also replicate this on a smaller scale by employing a team to chop, bedazzle, and post clips designed to punish the algorithm with exposure until something hooks. / there is a dollar rate, there is frequency, and there is duration. It operates like any other campaign. / It should be noted that this isn’t a cheat code and the content itself must be remarkable in some way. Source: https://substack.com/home/post/p-197483620

" As far as I can tell, there’s an incredibly broad inclination in human beings to enslave each other. From the great scale into the small scale, with debt, usury, law... The other side of the coin is what we'd call culture, which is actually the proper use of coin within society: spending it on beautiful objects. " - Paraphrased from James Gillick, "The Grand Gesture: Reviving Sacred Art, Craft, and Culture" (~00:23:10), The New Humanum. James Gillick is an English figurative artist. Link to the full film on YouTube: https://youtu.be/96J2RIQLvC4?