New to Smart Contract development and am wondering if there is anyway to do a timed countdown inside a contract.
Basically I want to see if it's possible to trigger a process inside a contract that decrements or increments a value in the contract every x amount of seconds or minutes.
I wanted to see if this was possible to do internally? Or if the only way was to have some backend bot running to perform increment/decrement transactions.
Any insight is much appreciated! Thank You!
Rather than actually changing some variable over time, compute it on the fly.
E.g., to ask "How many seconds until x time?" you could write a function like this:
function secondsRemaining() public view returns (uint256) {
if (x <= now) {
return 0; // already there
} else {
return x - now;
}
}
Essentially, a contract can't do anything by itself; it needs to be invoked via a transaction. But you can lazily compute the value instead when it's needed.
Every change on the Ethereum blockchain is always triggered from outside by a signed transaction. Hence, there is no way to implement a reoccurring timer within the smart contract itself. You'll always need to trigger it from outside.
