On how speculators can avoid RAM fees on EOS

Let us start with a brief review of RAM in EOSIO. Users can buy and sell RAM through the system contract. The price is determined by the system as the ratio between the EOS balance of the connector and available RAM at the moment of the operation. The connector balance is 1,000,000 EOS plus the balance of the eosio.ram account, consisting of all the EOS deposits from RAM purchases. For each buy/sell operation, the system charges a fee of o.5%. The fee is aimed at reducing short term speculation in this market. Intuitively, with less speculation we get less RAM price, and therefore more opportunities for development.

Now, it is not too difficult to produce a smart contract that allows speculators to trade ram without fees. Create a token and call it TRAM. Initially, everybody has 0 TRAM. Whenever someone sends EOS to the contract, it buys RAM for itself and issues TRAM to the sender, as many as bytes have been bought. The TRAM token can be transferred freely. Whenever someone sends TRAM to the contract, it sells the corresponding RAM and sends the subsequent incoming EOS to the sender. Thus we obtain a token which is backed 1:1 on RAM and can be traded without fees. The system fee is only paid when TRAM token is issued and retired. In the long run, the fee is diluted among the traders. Jointly with Matías Romeo, we developed such a smart contract. We did some tests and it works as expected. We will publish the code soon, after addressing some minor technical issues.

With this tool speculators wouldn’t have to pay fees for buying and selling TRAM tokens while developers would still have to pay fees for buying RAM. This scenario is undesirable, it would be better to directly remove ram fees for everyone. What other possible outcomes can you envision? I invite the EOS community to discuss the issue.