I'm a very procedural programmer, so I am having trouble wrapping my head around your contracts system because it seems to be very abstract.
Can you please explain in more detail (preferably with an example) of how to make a useful contract in more of a real world scenario? Since it obviously can't do anything useful inside the ethereum network without also communicating outside of the network?
In the first part of this series, we talked about how the internet allows us to create decentralized corporations, automatons that exist entirely as decentralized networks over the internet, carrying out the computations that keep them alive over thousands of servers. As it turns out, these networks can even maintain a Bitcoin balance, and send and receive transactions. These two capacities: the capacity to think, and the capacity to maintain capital, are in theory all that an economic agent needs to survive in the marketplace, provided that its thoughts and capital allow it to create sellable value fast enough to keep up with its own resource demands. In practice, however, one major challenge still remains:
how to actually interact with the world around them.http://blog.ethereum.org/?p=10/bootstrapping-a-decentralized-autonomous-corporation-part-i