RAM prizes are the current controversy topic No. 1 these days. Prices running up 10x and beyond in a few days, make costs for airdrops and creation of new accounts ever more prohibitive.
Doing an airdrop against the genesis snapshot would now cost 150K$ and at current prices of 0.75Eos/KB a new account would cost some 25$
Man, each week sees another controversy on this chain, i feel i should cancel my streaming subscription already with crypto live offering an unprecedented arc of tension!
The major implicit promise of EOS is that it might be the first blockchain to enable mass adoption, where users wouldn't even need to care about account creation. But with current prices of RAM (which might even not be the maximum yet) this looks highly unlikely.
This way it will be impossible for new users to enter the blockchain, because they would need to buy EOS first on an exchange before actually getting on an account, or use a service to do so, which would charge a fee on top of the mere RAM cost.
This is certainly a problem, but the market will solve that right?
Wrong!
The latest EMLG broadcast, that featured @Dan brought more light on the matter. Major take aways are:
- RAM is not that easy to expand, as not only block producers, but all (their?) nodes as well would need to increase, which would require an enormous effort.
- RAM doesn't come with EOS possesion, and needs to be bought seperately, and specifically from the smart contract (otherwise RAM could be classified as financial instrument)
- RAM cannot be leased out or sold between private parties
- The RAM speculation market might already price in a 2TB RAM stack available, so vastly more than what is attainable in the mid term future
- Dans recommends the bps to increase RAM by not more than 20% p.a. and rather wait for inter blockchain communication (IBC)and sidechains to solve the RAM scalability issue.
Unfortunately IBC is still far away, likely to be available next year, and Dan's argument, that EOS is still cheaper then ETH is imo a quite weak one, as ETH has been serving as the bad example of a blockchain, so being marginally better is not a benchmark and aside that we are living in world where people tend to evade acquisition costs and go for capsule coffee.
It just means you need to keep the entry bar as low as possible to achieve widespread adoption.
The latest EOSRad.io show ep18 had a RAM Panel, where basically everyone, (including EOS Go folks) spoke out against Dan's assessment of the situtaion. Unfortunately without no final solution.
A proposal to start raising RAM right away might provide a bit of alleviation, but not substantially. There are a few further workaround for airdrops, which would require less ram, and also dapps would need to work more memory-efficiently which is good.
But there is no real solution, at least from BPs there is some willingness to change the system and not take the situation for granted. With RAM being so limited and, there being currently no use for unstaked EOS coins, the incentive to continue to buy up is just huge.
I remember when i joined Steemit and needed to wait 2 weeks to get my account activated with the basic delegation. Despite this somewhat socialist delay i was able to start to discover ans interact on Steem for free and i wasn't forced to buy in right away (which i'd never have).
This simple option just doesn't exist on EOS, as you need to buy non-transferable RAM at a high price. I assume very few newbies will be ready to invest a considerable amount of money, neither will large scale smart contracts, because they can never give away these amounts of funds at large scale.
My assumption this issue might be more severe than the technical glitches we have had, or the issues with governance, because all these things can be fixed. But to the RAM issue there is currently no real solution (at least not midterm).
Update 4.7.2018: We have quite few promising news:
- Dan meanwhile suggest to increase RAM BY 1TB / year
- Introduction of poorman.tokenby @Genereos: Users will need to provide the RAM for an airdrop
- Bankor too has proposed a solution: Basically they propose to burn the amount of EOS in the pool for ram by 11%p.a.