Ethereum smart contracts are normally not able to start automatically on a timely basis, there should be an external service that calls the contract periodically. You can however use Oraclize as an external service for such a use-case. Although Oraclize is an external service that one has to trust, but it works in a relative secure way providing different kind of security guarantees for the execution. Example code can be realized by the following two functions in a smart contract that is inherited from a version of the OrcalizeAPI, like from usingOraclize:
function __callback(bytes32 myid, string result) {
// SECURITY CHECK
if (msg.sender != oraclize_cbAddress()) revert();
// SCHEDULE NEXT UPDATE
scheduleUpdate();
}
function scheduleUpdate() payable {
if (oraclize_getPrice("URL") > this.balance) {
LogNewOraclizeQuery("Not enough fund");
} else {
// NEXT UPDATE IS SCHEDULED IN 60 MIN
oraclize_query(60, "URL", " .. test url ..");
}
}
Experimental implementation can be found under my github repo. Certainly, this is not necessarily the cheapest way for the operation, depending on the exact business logic operational cost might be extreme high. As a simple example, considering a simple code time of writing, the one simple transaction cost of incrementing a state variable with the cost of the service is around 0.01 ether,
