Bitcoins and other crytocurrencies are designed to offer a fully decentralized architecture including small transaction fees among others. The Bitcoin blockchain provides a framework that offers a certain level of "pseudonymity".

While concealing the identities of the parties involved in a transaction is a very good feature of this blockchain, in most cases "pseudonymity" does not guarantee "unlinkability" as the possibility of tracking down a transaction is high. This is due to the fact that details (addresses of the participating parties etc) of every transaction are stored publicly on the blockchain and can easily be accessible by anyone.

A system where no single entity can monitor or block the transfer of funds as opposed to centralized electronic money and central banking systems . The validity of each cryptocurrency's coins is provided by a blockchain. A blockchain is a continuously growing list of records, called blocks, which are secured and linked using cryptography.

However, in 2011, rival cryptocurrencies emerged, this increases the idea of decentralized and encrypted currencies. These rival cryptocurrencies are also known as altcoins and generally try to improve on the original bitcoin design by offering greater speed and advantage. With the advent of other cryptocurrencies, several research have been made through them, many projects and technologies have been pioneered.

Current State Of The Blockchain System

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Although Bitcoin and other blockchain-based cryptocurrecies provide some level of pseudonymity by not directly publishing the identities of the participating parties.

Over the years, the pseudonymity has been taken to be unlinkability but the revelation is that cryptocurrencies are prone to de-anonymization attacks. By observing the flow of transactions stored in the public blockchain, third parties can make guesses about the identities parties involved. The privacy issue is considered a problem that needs to be solved because it exposes the users to a radar, and this might make users lose confidence in the blockchain technology, especially users that cherish privacy.

As cryptocurrencies grew to meet global demand, the issue of scalability was also seen to surface, it is assumed that the initial design was not meant for widespread use and adoption, while paypal manages 193 transactions per second and visa manages 1667 transactions per second, ethereum does only 20 transactions per second. The main scalability problem would be the time taken to put a transaction in the block and that taken to reach a consensus.

Earlier Approaches To Privacy Problem In Blockchain

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*The traditional banking model achieves a level of privacy by limiting access to information to the parties involved and the trusted third party. The necessity to announce all transactions publicly precludes this method, but privacy can still be maintained by breaking the flow of information in another place: by keeping public keys anonymous. As clever as his approach was, it does not totally solve the privacy issue in the blockchain, the best, his approach could offer was to overshadow the transaction history but the amounts being transferred and links between one transfer of value and the next transfer of that value were still visible to the public. As time went by, it was discovered that the identities of the participants could be de-anonymized, this led to discovery of more approaches

Gregory Maxwell tried to address privacy of amounts and privacy of history, he encrypted the amounts that goes into a transaction and the amount that comes out and still ensured validation of the transaction balances. Maxwell also introduced Conjoin, which is a mixing approach. In this approach, a set of users can create a transaction using multiple input and output addresses thereby making the transaction untraceable by externals.

Nicolas van Saberhagen introduced the blind's signature, users can sign a message without knowing its exact content. Shen Noether approach is in two flavors because it combined the confidential transaction approach of Maxwell and the blind signature approach of van Saberhagen.

The downside of Maxwell Confidential transaction is that it is space consuming, it consumes excess storage of data, his Coinjoin approach requires users interaction. The ills of Saberhagen signatures are that it does not prevent internal unlinkablity of transaction and there must be permanent storage of outputs.

One-way aggregate signatures ( OWAS), desgined by Dr. Yuan Horas is another good approach, it fixes the problem of user interaction seen in Maxwell Conjoin approach. OWAS enhances cryptocurrency anonymity by merging transactions together into a larger transaction such that no links between the inputs and outputs of the original transaction is left on the block chain thus helps to remove proofs of funds transfer and also darken the transaction graph. The advantage of merging transactions is that it makes the blockchain leaner.

As good as OWAS approach is, the fact that it uses a pairing-bases cryptography which is slow and allows a benefit of doubt make it flawed.

Beam Solution

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Beam is a new scalable, confidential cryptocurrency.

Beam is a mimblewimble-based solution provider to privacy issues on the blockchain. It uses the confidential transaction idea of Gregory Maxwell as well as transaction cut-through as a leverage. BEAMsolution is a scriptless approach

● Confidential Transaction
The essence of confidential transaction is to conceal the transfer of funds, however, BEAM does not require users interaction. The equation by which confidential transaction works is coded.

C= rG + vH.

C reperesents crytographic commitment, G and H are elliptic curve generators, v is the amount, and r is a secret random blinding key.

However, to ensure that transaction validation is done, the sum of the output commitment plus f*H minus input commitment must be equal to zero.

C(output) + fH - C( input) = 0*, where C(output) is output commitment, C( input) is input commitment and f is the transaction fee. However, this zero transaction values does not ensure privacy because the sender can know the blinding key of his recipient. In order to avoid this, a sender and a recipient can jointly create a transaction with b input addresses that transfers its input to b output addresses. Each party individually observes the transaction; if her own output address appears in the list of recipients, she signs the transaction as a player with her own private key. Eventually the transaction carries k different signature.

Beam as a cryptocurrency mixer is explained by the fact that if senders K1 and K2 wish to send two bitcoins to recipients K1 and K2 respectively, the amount is mixed so the information that become public is minimized. One would just find out that K1 bitcoins went to either K1 or K2 but not to which address exactly.

● Transaction Cut-through
The transaction cut-through feature of Beam affords the opportunity to make the blockchain leaner and non-bulky. In bitcoin, both unspent and large transaction volume are left in the domain, these take a larger amount of space. Currently, the estimated number of blocks in bitcoin is 423000 blocks and about 80GB of data is needed to validate these.

However, the Mimblewimble protocol of Beam requires little space for transactions and unspent outputs. With this, only the unspent outputs, explicit input amounts and every K*G value are left in the blockchain which can be validated. The importance of this is that it makes the chain scalable and prevents overcrowding of the blockchain. The result is a moderate blockchain as little data is needed.

Features Of The Beam Blockchain

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● Confidentiality & Absolute Control: Information about the participating parties is not made public. It also gives users control over the information to share.

● Versatility: Beam supports many transaction types such as escrow , time locked transactions atomic swap and more.

● Scalability: It allows transactions to be carried out as fast as possible thereby avoiding excessive computational overhead.

● Sustainability: 20% of block mining reward is used to encourage development and promotion of Beam.

● Usability: It is busniess-friendly as it is usable by both individuals and small scale businesses since it can be operated on desktop and mobile.

● Compatibility: Blocks are mined using Equihash Proof- of- Work algorithm to allow for broad adoption.

Other striking features are;

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● Implemented from scracth in C++ by a team of professional developers.

● No trusted setup required.

● No premine. No ICO. Backed by a treasury, emitted from every block during the first five years.

● Limited emission using periodic halving with total amount of coins~210 million.

● Superior scalability through compact blockchain size- using cut- through feature of MimbleWimble BEAM blockchain is orders of magnitude smaller than any other blockchain implementation.

Under The Hood

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Comparison Of The Beam Blockchain Withe others

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Use Cases

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Mr. A: Hello friend, I made a transaction through cryptocurrency and I am bothered about the privacy.
Mr.B: Oh! Yours is a little problem, my organization is at a risk of being fined because we have not been able to comply with standard organization law that states that employees private information should be made confidential.
Mr.A: Really!
Mr. B: My main concern is about the privacy of my transaction. Any virtual currency that can guarantee the confidentiality of my transaction is a topnotch.

For Individuals

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By now, we are sure Mr. A now has a place to find solace, he does not need to worry about the confidentiality of his transaction. No one knows when he makes transaction, who he makes transaction with and the amount of transaction he makes. Thanks to BEAM that brought confidentiality

For Corporate Bodies/Industries

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Mr. C does not need to have sleepless nights on how to prevent being fined for not making the information of his employees confidential. He can rely on the confidentiality offered by BEAM to cover his organization need of a protected employees private information

Meet The Team

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Investors

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Roadmap

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Summary & Conclusion

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Beam solution is based on the MimbleWimble to eliminate the issue of scalability and privacy on the blockchain. Beam has the following features/benefits; confidentiality, versatility, usability, compatibility, scalability and sustainability.

With the use of Beam, identity of users, transfer of funds and transaction history are kept away from the public space. It also maintains a sizeable blockchain. Also the problem of scalability that Beam has phased out increases transaction efficiency by carrying out multiple transaction in a very short time.

In conclusion, it is of no doubt that the lingering privacy and scalability problems in cryptocurrency are solvable through Beam.

For More Information Visit

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● Beam Website
● Beam Position Paper
● Mimblewimble Paper
● Beam YouTube
● Beam Telegram
● Beam Facebook
● Beam Github
● Beam Bitcointalk
● Beam Medium
● Beam Twitter

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Beam2018