Obscure lessons, Permaweb
The Coinbase CEO went to Twitter and wondered publicly what games the SEC was playing.
6/ They refuse to tell us why they think it's a security, and instead subpoena a bunch of records from us (we comply), demand testimony from our employees (we comply), and then tell us they will be suing us if we proceed to launch, with zero explanation as to why.
— Brian Armstrong (@brian_armstrong) September 8, 2021
Then the SEC subtweeted him, apparently.
What exactly are bonds and how do they work?
— SEC Investor Ed (@SEC_Investor_Ed) September 8, 2021
We’ve got a 30-second overview 👇 pic.twitter.com/RZul1SIXAW
So, what's the message?
From Wikipedia:
In finance, a bond is an instrument of indebtedness of the bond issuer to the holders. The most common types of bonds include municipal bonds and corporate bonds. Bonds can be in mutual funds or can be in private investing where a person would give a loan to a company or the government.
... to a company or the government... or to an unknown third party via a smart contract, I guess. If we stretch the definition a bit? Is the SEC obliquely saying that Coinbase should register with FINRA? And by extension, should Uniswap, Sushiswap, and countless other DeFi projects follow suit? Is liquidity mining also a bond?
Creativity in the blockchain space is breathtaking. Cambrian explosion, etc. It must be difficult for a regulatory body to police the whole universe. The temptation must be great to approximate and to generalize, to force ill-fitting concepts into pre-established tought buckets.
Arweave (yellow paper) is a data storage blockchain. Unlike IPFS and Filecoin, it focuses on long-term storage (durability), rather than availability, meaning it aims to keep your files for a very long time rather than spreading them for instant access. The blockchain incentivizes retention more than performance. It introduces the Permaweb.
What for? It can be difficult in the era of the cloud, to imagine the need for more redundancy, for more backup. However, we also live in times of challenged truth, times when history gets re-written and media cycles are counted in minutes, not days. In a recent example, the Chinese government forced the Hong Kong Apple Daily newspaper to shut down and activists uploaded its archive to ARWeave.
Union Square Ventures also offers a few project ideas.
Rather than with flashy milestones, I think we'll see this blockchain's recognized value increase slowly as its promise to live on forever is kept. Victory by survival, not by supremacy.
The operators of the network - the miners - decide what they allow to be stored. Hence, censorship resistance is not guaranteed. Some content could be banned if all miners do it unanimously.