External stimulus is helpful but not required in most cases. There’s no problem to end an auction without a trigger: On every bid transaction check the time (auction is not over) and if bid is highest, mark as winner. On claim transaction, check the time (auction is over) and if winner, send the tokens.
The reason most blockchains like the transactional approach is that it’s much easier to deal with fees this way. And fees are a way to fight spam.
There are external stimulus drivers for blockchain but they are usually external entities that are not part of the core protocols. Keepers is a good example of this, also my project Orbs is doing something very similar.
Oct 12, 2022, 1:06 PM
From a practical prospective of smart contract, isn't the must of doing a transaction everytime to change contract state too much? For example let's say a smart contract should give 10 ton on 10 successive iterations every 10 days. It's impossible to do on blockchain alone right? There should be someone (also internal) that gives "life" to smart contract remembering him to update his state. Same thing happens for dns ownership refresh i guess
Oct 12, 2022, 1:31 PM
I'm building timer that works on TON without any external messages so it would be considered reliable 🙂 As well, I hope there will be a lot of users so prices could be lower than for self-hosted timers.
Oct 13, 2022, 6:58 PM
Now I'm curious 👀
Oct 13, 2022, 6:59 PM
I think prices will be greater than 1 TON/h (otherwise someone could schedule a message to 2106 year, and timer would have to work all of this time), but for certain price will be less than 10 TON/h.
Oct 13, 2022, 7:01 PM
Could you explain the idea?
Oct 13, 2022, 7:05 PM
The timer sends message to itself to keep working.
Straightforward implementation uses too much TON, so there are some tricky optimizations, secret until timer releases 😄
Straightforward implementation uses too much TON, so there are some tricky optimizations, secret until timer releases 😄
Oct 13, 2022, 7:06 PM
Woa! So you auto-proc internal transactions on every blockchain block?
Oct 13, 2022, 7:07 PM
Yeah) But if contract would just send message to itself, it could process a lot of messages during one block.
Oct 13, 2022, 7:09 PM
You can actually work around async messages time to proc multishard messages so you have less fees right?
That way you could take advantage of time to travel of message in an interesting way 😲
Oct 13, 2022, 7:10 PM
I also have a different idea to reduce fees)
Oct 14, 2022, 2:17 AM
You made me realize we can use smart contracts in other interesting ways. Thank you for your prospective !
Oct 14, 2022, 11:38 AM
You may find this interesting https://github.com/EmelyanenkoK/ton_scheduler
Oct 14, 2022, 12:39 PM