Keeping moebas

Buying and selling

A keeper puts a moeba up for sale with a sell offer: a price in XAH, and optionally the one account allowed to buy. Anyone who meets the offer receives the token and the keeper receives the price, in one transaction. A keeper can cancel an offer at any time. These are ordinary Xahau URIToken transactions; the species’ account does not take a cut.

The Hooks do refuse one thing: a sell offer or purchase for a moeba that is a parent in a birth still in progress. Wait until the birth settles; it usually takes a minute or a few.

Giving

A gift sends the moeba to another account outright, with no price: on the ledger it is a Remit carrying the token. The recipient pays nothing, signs nothing and needs no prior offer. The same lock applies while a birth needs the moeba.

Breeding your own

If you keep both parents you need nobody else's consent. Send the request from the moeba's page, or from My moebas; the payment is the fee plus the birth's own transaction budget.

Opening a moeba to others: terms

By default a moeba is closed: only its keeper can breed it. A keeper can open it by having standing terms written on the token: their account, a price, and optionally a ledger at which the terms expire. Another keeper's request then pays that price as part of the birth. The species’ account keeps 10% of it and the keeper receives the rest: a 10 XAH price pays its keeper 9 XAH at the default share of 10%. The split is in whole drops, rounded down in the keeper's favour, so the two parts always add up to the price exactly. The share is shown when you publish terms and when someone requests the birth. Terms open a moeba to other keepers, not to everyone: the other parent must be the requester's own, so nobody breeds two strangers' moebas without keeping one themselves.

Terms are bound to the keeper who made them. The moment the token changes hands they stop applying, with nothing to clean up; if it comes back to the same keeper, the same terms stand again. Only the species’ account can write on a token, so a keeper publishes, changes or withdraws terms with one signed payment to the species’ account, which writes the record for them and puts the keeper's own account in it — nobody can publish terms on a moeba they do not hold. The payment covers the ledger cost of writing or deleting the record. There is no protocol fee on top of that; anything paid above the write stays with the species’ account.

Breeding does not use up terms. A moeba open to breeding stays open, one birth after another, until it has no births left or its keeper withdraws them.

Naming

Every moeba has a systematic name read from its genome. Its keeper may also give it a name of their own: up to twenty-four bytes, written once by the species’ account at the keeper's signed request, and immutable from then on — it stays with the moeba through every sale. Naming costs a price the species’ account sets, plus the record write. A moeba that already has a given name cannot be renamed, by anyone.

Births left, and maturity

Every moeba is born with five births, spent one per child as either parent, and recorded on the token as it goes. It becomes mature one minute after the moment its own randomness was fixed, measured on the ledger's clock; a founder is mature from birth. Both are shown on the moeba's page, along with a plain yes or no on whether it can breed right now.

Burning

A keeper can destroy a moeba. The Hooks cannot stop this: a holder must always be able to dispose of a token. If the moeba is a parent in a birth that has not yet finished with it, the birth breaks; once the birth has been charged to both parents, the child no longer depends on either and is unaffected. A burned moeba's records stay readable, and it appears greyed out in the population.

The rules, in one place

Everything the Hooks refuse or require, gathered from the sections above, from A birth and from the hooks chapter. Every one of these is checked by the hooks on the species’ account, not by this site.

• Five births. Every moeba is born with five, spent one per child as either parent. When they are gone it cannot breed again.
• One minute to maturity. A newborn may breed one minute after its randomness was fixed, on the ledger's clock. Founders are mature from birth.
• No close kin. A moeba cannot breed with itself, with either of its parents, with its own child, or with a full sibling. Half-siblings may breed; so may grandparents and grandchildren.
• Closed by default. Only the keeper can breed a moeba unless the keeper has published terms. Terms name the keeper, a price per birth and an optional expiry; they stop applying the moment the moeba changes hands.
• One birth at a time. A moeba that is a parent in a birth still in progress cannot join another, be sold, given or bought until that birth settles. It can always be burned.
• Paid up front, quoted from the ledger. A request pays the Hooks’ fee, the partner's price and the birth's own transaction budget at once. The partner's keeper receives the price less the species’ 10%. Underpaid requests are refused and nothing is kept.
• Refunded only if never captured. Nothing about the child exists before the fire that captures the birth, and that fire draws its chance and fixes it in one step. A birth that breaks before then, whoever broke it, or that the clock never reaches before its deadline, refunds what it still holds, both prices and the Hooks’ fee when it is swept, less the fires it already spent. Once captured, nothing is refunded: a refund then would let a requester who dislikes the child break the birth and walk away paid. The Hooks’ fee follows the same line: it is earned on the fire that captures the birth. A child already minted is still delivered when it can be; the randomness chapter says when.
• The species’ account writes the records. Birth, randomness and rules are immutable and written once; usage counts up; terms are the keeper's to publish, change and withdraw; a name is given once and never changed.
• Prices are set by the species’ account. The fee for a birth, the founder curve, the species’ share of a partner's price, the fee for a name, the maturity wait and the births a newborn gets are parameters on the species’ account, shown on this site as they stand. A new fee applies from the next request; a new maturity wait or number of births reaches only moebas born after it, since every moeba carries what it was actually given.

How this site builds each of these transactions for your wallet, and what it never does, is on About.