gno.land/r/moul/x/games/lastwords/v0

One string, on chain, forever. Pay more than the last writer paid and the slot is yours. When the clock runs out, whatever is in it stays there permanently.

Price("famous last words")   # what it costs right now, in ugnot
Write("famous last words")   # send that much with the call
Settle()                     # after the clock runs out, anyone may call it
Withdraw()                   # sweep what you are owed

The artefact at the end is the point: this is a bidding war over an epitaph, not over a prize. It is also the smallest thing that exercises the two libraries under it, which is why it exists.

The last writer does not take the pot. They take the slot, which is what they were bidding for. The pot goes to everyone else who wrote, pro rata to what each paid. Winner-takes-all makes the second-to-last writer the mark, everybody can see that, and so nobody joins.

Half of every payment is credited to the writer it displaces, immediately and whatever happens afterwards. A zero-sum game minus gas gives a second player no reason to exist; being overwritten early has to be survivable.

The clock terminates. Each write pushes the deadline a fifth of the way toward a hard end fixed when the slot opened, and never past it, and never to less than 300 blocks from now. The last stretch stays long enough for a transaction to land in, so the slot is won by paying rather than by being unreachable.

Nothing is ever pushed. Dividends and settlement shares are credited to a ledger and swept by Withdraw. A realm that pays inside a loop over its roster is a gas bomb, and the more successful the game gets the more certain it is to brick.

Three things worth knowing before writing:

• The message is capped at 280 bytes and priced per byte, because the message is the storage cost and an uncapped one is an unbounded write at a constant price.
• Price is a query, and an underpaying write is refused, not refunded. Read it in the same breath as you send.
• Settle is permissionless. Leaving settlement to an interested party is how a pot stays unclaimed.

The realm is the wiring; the parts are libraries: p/moul/x/games/clock owns the deadline and its guards, p/moul/x/games/prorata owns the split, and p/moul/x/daily/pullpayment owns the credit ledger.

The stored message is caller-typed text rendered as markdown on a page that cannot be edited afterwards, so it goes through ui.Inline before it is shown and a newline is refused at write time.

Part of moul/gno-contracts — moul's versioned gno.land contracts. See the repository for the full catalog, build/test tooling, and usage.

Dependency graph:

🧪 Highly experimental — potentially vibe-coded. Not audited; may break, change, or be removed at any time. Do not use with anything of value. Full disclaimer: DISCLAIMER.