Preface
I will not be giving an exhaustive technical dive into RAM usage within EOS; I cover the basics to start you on your trading journey.
Remember that speculating on anything is a risk, I am not telling you what to do with your money or giving financial advice.
The Experiment
During the long hype and build up of the EOS launch, a lot of discussions where focused around the various ways a token holder could profit from the ecosystem, RAM trading was one of those topics.
I want to experience first hand the process involved in participating in RAM trading and how to collate all the data needed to be successfull. I will be doing the same for all the various options (I am really looking forward to using the Chintai platform when it is deployed), and I will document how it goes here.
As the title states, it is time to delve into the RAM trading market.
Why Is There A RAM Market
RAM on the EOS chain is a finite resource (per chain) that dApp developers will need to store their smart contracts for execution and processing, and of course ‘standard’ users to store account details.
The EOSIO software has built in intelligence to monitor RAM supply and demand using the BANCOR protocol. This protocol will also be used to determine the price of RAM at any given time, and will adjust the price automatically accordingly to conditions.
So, there is a finite resource that will be in demand as network usage increases.
Finite availability + Demand = Opportunity.
Side note, if RAM availability gets to a critical level, a side chain will be formed offering a fresh batch of RAM for users and dAdpp deveoplers. Side chains or horizontal scaling is how EOS will continue to grow.
Forecasting this, Block One designed resource allocation for RAM differently than CPU and Memory. Every account is allocated an amount of RAM sufficent enough to use their account and perhaps a small dApp. If you want more RAM, you most turn to the RAM market and ‘spend’ EOS tokens in exchange. This is very different from CPU and Memory where you stake your EOS and can unstake at any time to have them returned to a liquid state (after the 3 day grace period).
If you want to get your EOS tokens back from RAM you purchased, you will need to sell it on the trading market and hope the price is greater than the price you sold it for. Chances are, if you get in early enough you will make a profit or if you purchase some when a sideman chain forms.
How To Buy RAM
So I have taken the plunge and purchased a chunk of RAM at the price of 0.01943963 EOS per kb. Once purchased, you can verify the allocation is correct by going to https://eostoolkit.io/search a entering the account name your sent the RAM too.
I used the online tool from @genereos that uses Scatter to sign and verify transactions.
The link to buy RAM using EOS as the purchase value
https://eostoolkit.io/account/buyram.
The link to buy RAM using total bytes required as the purchase value
https://eostoolkit.io/account/buyram.
- There is a 1% fee attached to each buy and sell that you will need to ad into your calculations
@generes also have a great walkthrough on how to setup Scatter correctly that can be found here, it also includes walkthroughs on using the various tools they offer. I will mention that when I used Scatter, I had to link my 'active' key and not my 'owner' key. This may be a bug, but either key should work and it is not a major problem.
How To Sell RAM
I have not used this process as of yet, but I am assuming (hoping) it is just as simple as buying. Once again @genereos to the rescue, the URL to sell is here. This tie you will only be given the topic to sell a number of Bytes
Monitor The Price
We have a few options for price monitoring. A Reddit user designed this site (I have forgotten his name so cannot give credit).
https://www.feexplorer.io/EOS_RAM_price Will give almost live pricing with historical data for trend analysis. The interactive chart Ian also pretty sweet
Then we have the site from @eosnewyork that looks great and gives us all the data we could need.
Happy trading all
Just heard of Eos ram trading few minutes ago ... searching for more info, I encountered your article .... fantastic ! Following and voting for sure ... waiting for more updates from you .
Well done @aclarkuk82
✅
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How i wish to know about this EOS RAM
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Let me know what you need, I will be getting ready to sell some very soon and will post the outcome ;-)
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EOS, learn something new everyday :-)
Thanks for all this splendid early birdy info.
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Is there any tool that can help us easily check total ram we have and the current price..... Something like a ram market?.
Secondly : if I spend 2eos to buy ram? I understand the eos leaves my wallet and if the price of ram doubles, it means I can sell the ram and make 4 eos right?
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Hey Sam, yep you can check your current allocation using various tools but no combination yet that I am aware of.
You will not get exactly double as there is a 1% fee charged for both buying and selling RAM, but there is a really good calculator written by @eosnewyork to help you work out profit or loss here.
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Thank you, I understand we have a current supply of ram, is it possible for the supply increase and decrease the price? If yes, who will initiate that?
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Absolutely, we currently have 64G total which is very low. As with anything, when there is more available, the price goes down, supply and demand.
Dan Larimer suggested that the go-live team launch with a limited amount of RAM so that whales could not swoop in and buy it all. We will get a new allocation very soon I feel, block producers will initiate this increase. As to when they will do this, I can only guess around 75 - 90% of total RAM allocated.
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OK thanks
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RAM trading is definately something to look into. Just be careful as there are several ways the price of RAM can crash including BPs adding RAM to the network and sidechains opening up with cheaper RAM.
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Thanks for useful info. One thing you did not mention that before launching side-chains bps can and will be increasing ram available on the main EOS chain.
Currently main chain has 64 GB, but that will increase over time as needed.
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Good shout, thank you
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Great article thanks for the info
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Since today, I'm part of your followers!
Have a nice day,
Thierry
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Hugely informative article! what I not really get, the ram quota we can see earlier, where does it come from, is that attached to your account or to the amount of eos one holds. I created a new account and the only cost related where the ram I needed.
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Hey dude, do you mean when an account is first created?
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That would be my question. With your account you had an ram quota of 7kb, I wider how that is calculated...
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I still not understand in details where this ram is located i know block producers validate the transactions but if i want to store some information on EOS blockchain where physically i store it . Is evry block producer runs his own data center ? Or only block one is running one no one explain this .
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Every bp runs a server node which holds account data in ram for fast processing. block.one is not participating at all.
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Ok server node means one server multiple servers ?For example i run bitcoin core qt wallet on one lenovo laptop with 1TB SSD so i have full copy of blockchain.How eos work is someone can explain me ?
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Also if i want to create some website and store article data in EOS blockchain where exactly this data will be stored on every block producer server or ?
Can i run full node or only BP have rights to do it ?
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Each BP runs one or more eos nodes and each node has to have identical blockchain data.
You can run a full node too like anyone else.
For more information I would recommend you do some reading on dev portal.
https://developers.eos.io/
EOS Wiki
https://github.com/EOSIO/eos/wiki
and StackExchange for Q&A
https://eosio.stackexchange.com/
Also there is a EOS Resource Planner you can use to calculate your resource needs.
https://www.eosrp.io/
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On the question about where to store data. Currently not yet available, but in development is a "storage" contract for EOS that will allow users to store
off- blockchain data on IPFS based storage servers that BPs can offer.
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So that means we still not able to decentralize web , the only benefits of eos is that is fast
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Have patience. Storage contract will be finished soon enough.
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