Sahek/nomad-poet

The Nomad Poet

A haiku that lives on Base and moves house. Each generation is an EIP-1167 clone holding its own verse, lineage hash and treasury. Anyone can call migrate() after the heartbeat elapses and collect a fee for midwifing the next generation.

What was wrong with the earlier drafts

Draft 1 (new PoetSoul inside PoetSoul) does not compile.

TypeError: Circular reference to contract bytecode either via "new" or
"type(...).creationCode" / "type(...).runtimeCode".

A contract's creation code would have to contain its own creation code. Self-replication in Solidity needs a factory, a clone, or raw codecopy.

Draft 2 (the minimal-proxy version) compiles but is dead on arrival. Three independent faults, each verified on a local EVM:

#	Fault	Observed
A	Word banks declared as storage arrays. Under delegatecall a clone reads its own storage, which is empty.	Every migration emitted ' / / ' — a blank poem, forever.
B	Clones have no receive(), and the logic contract had none either, so the proxy's fallback delegatecalls into a function that doesn't exist.	Every ETH send to the poet reverted, at 23,300 and 200,000 gas. Balance stayed at 0 wei. Nobody could ever donate.
C	_deployProxy() embedded address(this) as the implementation. Under delegatecall that is the clone, not the logic contract.	Generation 1's clone pointed at generation 0's clone. Each hop adds a delegatecall layer; gas grows without bound until the lineage dies.

Also: tx.origin instead of msg.sender for the keeper fee; no once-only guard, so anyone could re-fund a spent parent and fork the lineage; .transfer()'s 2300-gas cap.

What this version does differently

• Word banks are pure functions — the strings live in bytecode, not storage.
• SELF is an immutable set in the logic constructor. Immutables are baked into the executing code, so under delegatecall it correctly resolves to the logic contract.
• receive() on the logic contract, call{value:} everywhere. Clones accept ETH.
• migrated flag set before any external call. A soul migrates exactly once.
• PoetRegistry — one permanent address donors can bookmark. ETH sent there is forwarded to whoever is currently alive. Only the living poet may name its successor.
• The logic contract locks its own initializer in its constructor, so nobody can squat it and display a fake creator.

Honest caveat about the "creator signature"

creator is a label, not a proof. Anyone can deploy an identical lineage with your address burned in. What actually proves origin is the genesis deployment transaction and the PoetGenesis address — publish those. The lineageHash chain proves a given soul descends from that specific genesis; it proves nothing about who deployed the genesis.

Parameters and lifespan

HEARTBEAT_BLOCKS = 1800 (~1 hour on Base) and a flat MIGRATION_FEE = 0.0005 ether.

At one migration per hour the poet spends 0.012 ETH/day. Its lifespan is therefore seed / 0.012 days, and donations extend it linearly:

seed	migrations	lifespan
0.02 ETH	40	~1.7 days
0.10 ETH	200	~8.3 days
0.50 ETH	1,000	~42 days
1.00 ETH	2,000	~83 days

Note: an earlier estimate of "~$7/month, a single $10 donation keeps it alive for weeks" assumed 0.00015 ETH per migration. The fee is 0.0005 ETH — 3.3x higher — so the real figure is roughly 0.012 ETH/day, and 0.02 ETH buys under two days, not weeks. Seed accordingly, or switch to a percentage-of-balance fee if you want it to be unkillable.

The 0.0005 ETH fee is far above Base's ~313k gas cost, so keepers are reliably profitable and the poet will be migrated on schedule. That is by design — it also means the treasury drains at exactly the rate above, with no slack.

Verified locally

python3 test_lifecycle.py runs 6 generations (at 1,800-block heartbeats) on py-evm and asserts:

gas per migration  : min 313,517  max 313,571   (flat — no proxy chaining)
genesis deploy gas : 1,575,697
creator signature survived every generation     PASS
donations reach the living poet via one address PASS
double-migration rejected at every generation   PASS
clone implementation == logic at every hop      PASS

Deploy

Windows / PowerShell: follow STEPS.md. Three scripts, no WSL, no git, no libraries — install.ps1, then test-local.ps1, then deploy.ps1.

Everything else: forge create src/PoetSoul.sol:PoetGenesis --constructor-args "<haiku>" <creator> --value 0.02ether --rpc-url https://mainnet.base.org --account <keystore> --broadcast. The PoetGenesis constructor deploys the registry, the logic contract and the genesis soul in a single transaction, so no deploy-script framework is required.

Publish the registry address for donations, not the genesis soul — the soul moves, the registry doesn't. And publish the deployment tx hash as proof of origin; the creator field alone proves nothing.