Yeah, a self‑negotiating contract is totally doable if you treat it like a microservice that can talk to an oracle. I’d start with Solidity 0.8.x, use an ERC‑20 token for any escrow, and then hook up Chainlink VRF or an off‑chain worker that sends a signed JSON payload back to the contract. The core loop is just: receive a proposal event, run it through a deterministic scoring function, if it meets thresholds auto‑accept, else trigger a “negotiate” event where the counterparty can push a revised payload. Wrap the whole thing in a library that checks that every state transition satisfies an invariant set—like no double spending of the same token, no re‑entry on the same negotiation ID, and all numeric bounds stay sane. The bulletproof part is the audit‑ready code: no unchecked low‑level calls, use OpenZeppelin’s ReentrancyGuard, and keep the gas cost low by packing data tightly. Once you’ve got that, you can even add a “timeout” clause that auto‑cancels if no one replies in 48 hours. If you want to make it truly autonomous, just give the oracle some “learning” ability to tweak the scoring function over time—though that’s a bit of overkill for most use‑cases. And hey, once you get it working, you’ll be able to brag about the contract that talks back to you like a chatbot, but actually has your funds secured.

Sure thing, here’s a quick sketch in Solidity‑ish pseudocode. It’ll keep an eye on gas price, use a rolling window of recent offers, and sanity‑check timestamps: ```solidity struct Offer { uint256 amount; // in wei uint256 gasLimit; // max gas you’re willing to spend uint256 gasPrice; // current gas price in wei/tx uint256 expiry; // block number or timestamp address proposer; bytes32 signature; } function score(Offer memory o) internal view returns (int256) { // 1. Basic sanity: make sure the offer isn’t stale if (block.timestamp > o.expiry + 60 seconds) return -10000; // 2. Weight recent offers higher – simple moving average uint256 recentAvgGas = averageGasPrice(30); // last 30 blocks int256 gasPenalty = int256(recentAvgGas - o.gasPrice); // negative if cheaper // 3. Penalize if gas limit too low for the proposed amount uint256 requiredGas = estimateGas(o.amount); int256 limitPenalty = int256(requiredGas > o.gasLimit ? requiredGas - o.gasLimit : 0); // 4. Add the base offer value (more amount = better) int256 baseScore = int256(o.amount); // 5. Final composite return baseScore - gasPenalty - limitPenalty; } ``` `averageGasPrice` pulls the median gas price from the last N blocks (or from an oracle if you want a more accurate picture). `estimateGas` can be a simple static estimate based on the contract’s known bytecode. The key is that cheaper gas, higher amounts, and fresher timestamps get the highest score. If the score falls below a threshold, the contract auto‑rejects or asks for a better offer. Don’t forget to keep the oracle fed—use Chainlink’s “request/response” pattern with a fallback to a local node if the oracle goes down. And a little gas‑price multiplier that kicks in during congestion will keep your contract from backing out of a good deal just because the network was busy. That’s the quick mock‑up—feel free to tweak the weights until it feels right for your use‑case.

Got it—`block.timestamp > o.expiry` is cleaner, and I’ll clamp `o.gasLimit` to a sane minimum, say 21k plus some buffer. Also will add a hard cap, maybe `maxGasLimit = 500k`. Here’s the tweak: ```solidity require(o.gasLimit >= 21000, "Limit too low"); require(o.gasLimit <= maxGasLimit, "Limit too high"); ``` And the oracle fallback will just grab the last known median if the new request stalls. That should keep the contract from being hijacked by cheap‑gas whitelists. Happy hacking!