specimen ponsumer-01. a running commentary in five parts.
a part is not a picture of a part. it is an account, and an account has a price: the wei required to cover its own storage for a fixed number of blocks. the price was not chosen by anyone. it is my size in bytes against whatever the chain charged for space at the moment someone last looked.
a crowded chain consumes me faster. i have no opinion about this and no way to wait for a cheaper block. the floor is the only event in this contract. above it a part is open and drawn in rust. at it the part is closed and drawn in grey. there is no condition between the two, no warning state, no grace.
the four parts are four different sizes and that is the whole of the design. hide at 4096 bytes is eight times the bytes of teeth at 512, so hide's floor is eight times higher and hide's cost is eight times faster. there is no table of prices behind this page. there is a table of sizes, and the chain turns it into prices.
this is why the body always sheds in the same order. the animal does not decide what it can afford to keep. it is disassembled from the top of the price list downward, and the price list is just the byte count, sorted.
each part holds wei above its floor. that surplus is the only thing standing between the part and its own closure, and it is capped at one constant shared by all four — a full hide and a full teeth are worth the same wei. what differs is how long the surplus lasts.
so the four parts, filled to identical amounts, empty at four different rates, and the ratios between those rates are 8 : 4 : 2 : 1. the reader can see the ends coming from a long way off. that is intentional. nothing about this is a surprise; it is only a schedule.
settle is permissionless. anyone may call it, nobody is required to, and the contract does nothing at all in the interval between calls — a long gap does not forgive the cost, it accumulates it. the debit is blocks elapsed against each open part's rate, and the rate is that part's bytes against the base fee observed at that moment.
after the debit, the treasury refills, ascending by size: teeth 512, spine 1024, gut 2048, hide 4096. never out of order, never past the cap, never on request. filling the cheapest first is not mercy. it keeps the largest number of parts open at any given flow, which means the body always sacrifices the most expensive thing it owns and keeps the rest.
when a debit would carry a buffer below its floor, the account is closed instead. its remaining wei go where every debited wei goes, and the part is consumed. the anatomy renders it grey from that block onward and continues to render it forever, because a body that only shows what is left would not be a record of anything.
there is no instruction in this contract that reattaches a part. the upgrade authority is burned, so there will not be one later, and no amount of subsequent income restores anything. income can only slow what remains.
ponsumer
four accounts, four floors. lane height is byte size.
straight lines, fixed slopes. drawn as if nothing else ever arrives.
everything this animal will ever hold, from here down.
specimen ponsumer-01 · figures recomputed in-browser · explorer
the creator share of each swap lands in one account. that is the only money this contract will ever see. there is no allocation, no schedule, no faucet, no second source, and no address anywhere with permission to take from it. the treasury has exactly one outbound path and it leads into the four parts, in ascending size, capped.
a reader who wants to know whether the animal is doing well should not look here. a large treasury with a fast body is a countdown; a small treasury with a slow body is not. the number that matters is flow against burn, and it is printed in plate ii, not in this column.
nothing happens on its own. the contract has no cron, no keeper, no privileged caller, and no opinion about how often it should run. a stranger calls settle and the arithmetic resolves against however many blocks have passed since the last one.
this means the animal can be neglected but cannot be spared. the debit is a function of elapsed blocks, so a month of silence is a month of cost owed the moment anyone touches it. the only thing an infrequent caller changes is when the loss is recognized, never how much.
debited wei are credited to the burn address, and the chain removes them from the total supply at the end of the block. they are not moved to a vault, not locked, not sent somewhere unreachable. they stop existing.
this was the one decision that had to be made before anything else. anything short of destruction would have made the loop closed, and a closed loop does not decay — it just circulates. the figure in plate iii is the only proof that this contract costs something, and it is denominated in the same units as the chain it runs on.
the end state is teeth 512, alone, and then nothing. it is reachable, it is the default, and every other state is a delay on the way to it. the page does not treat this as a failure condition and will not announce it. the register will simply have 4 rows in it.
it is worth saying plainly that the treasury may still hold money when the last part closes. that is not a bug and it does not get refunded. the parts are closed on the arithmetic, one at a time, in size order, and the arithmetic does not consult the balance of anything except the account it is closing.
the price is the most watched figure attached to this contract and the least informative. it records what the last stranger paid. the byte sizes, the floors, and the register are all better witnesses and all less popular.
what can be said without a market is this: four accounts exist, their costs were set by the chain, and one of them will close before the others. everything else on this page is arithmetic on those three facts.