The idea of a permanode is that it's the anchor from which you build mutable objects. To serve as a reliable (consistently nameable) object it must have no mutable state itself. {"camliVersion": 1, "camliType": "permanode", // Required. Any random string, to force the sha1 of this // node to be unique. Note that the date in the ASCI-armored // GPG JSON signature will already help it be unique, so this // doesn't need to be a great random. "random": "615e05c68c8411df81a2001b639d041f" }