Security is required Freedom. BEAM a new scalable and confidential cryptocurrency.

Technology in the last 10 years has advanced with impressive strides. Of course, one of the main reasons has been the birth of the first successful implementation of the Blockchain technology in 2008.

The Blockchain technology is a decentralized platform with a public database that has a consensus protocol as an internal policy. To prove that each transaction in the Blockchain is valid, we no longer need a centralized entity that says what is true or false, the system requires that most participants in the system must agree that a block that is mined is valid.

When referring to Blockchain and decentralized technology most people associate the term with cryptocurrencies, and with Bitcoin. So far, the greatest implementation of this technology is to store and make transactions with our money. Despite 10 years have gone by since the launch of this new world and the appearance of new platforms and cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin is still the leader and who sets the trend in the market.

Currently, many people still believe that the transactions within Bitcoin are completely anonymous. It is assumed that no one can know the real identity of the people involved in a transaction. Being a platform with a public database, if all the transactions are schematized and organized, it is possible to know the information of each user in the network and know all their history. Not to mention the Over-the-counter (OTC) that can be generated by backroom deals.

Would people like to say how much money they have and how much they spend?

Without privacy, there is no fungibility. In General, if there is no privacy there will be no possibility of readily trading. The money could stop functioning as it has to since privacy is vital to ensure trust, which is indispensable for building a commercial relationship.

Countless people do not want their information to be available to any individual. Obviously, entire organizations would not want their transactions to be available to everyone (e.g. employees data). Since these data are confidential and should only be of interest to a few people. Let's introduce Beam, an alternative to solve current privacy problem.

Beam is a cryptocurrency for confidential and scalable use. Privacy implies freedom, these parameters are the necessary bases to build a healthy economy as privacy is one of the basis of human relationships.

With Beam, confidential transactions do not cause computational overload due to blockchain size increase. Blocks are mined using Equihash Proof-of-Work algorithm. In addition, Beam consensus protocol requires a large amount of memory as opposed to Bitcoin's SHA256 that requires a lot of processing power. Thus mining power centralization is less likely to occur.

Beam support escrow transactions, time-locked transactions, and atomic swaps. Also, Beam is a developer friendly platform because of it being implemented in C ++.

No information is stored in the Blockchain. So the address of the sender or the address of the receiver of a transaction is not stored on the Blockchain.

The users have total control over their privacy.

These features are granted thanks to the MimbleWimble protocol.

Let's compare Beam with other platforms.

Beam's backbone is the MimbleWimble protocol, which allows users to have both scalability and confidentiality because only essential information is encrypted and stored on the Blockchain. Beam is based on Bulletproofs protocol, "a compact and highly computation efficient implementation of zero knowledge range proofs that are attached to every transaction and checked by the system during transaction validation".

Its name is due to the spell MimbleWimble in the Harry Potter series. This protocol was designed for Tom Elvis Jedusor (French name of Lord Voldemort) on July 2016.

Hiding and binding are the bases of confidential transactions. This cryptographic commitment tries to hide (hiding) the key of a transaction until it is opportune to reveal it. When the hide factor is shown you can ensure that the commitment is valid (binding).

MimbleWimble uses the scheme called Pedersen Commitment that uses Elliptic Curve Cryptography, which is a linear combination of two factors: an actual value of the transaction and a blinding factor as shown below.

C = r . G + v . H

C	Pedersen commitment
r	A Blinding factor (secret key hiding v)
v	A Real value
G-H	Generator point on a specific elliptic curve

With this output is a rangeproof which proves that v is in [0, 2^64]. Practically impossible to obtain any result with any attack.

With the linearity scheme of Pedersen, if transaction one goes from A to B and the second goes from B to C, the intermediate transaction can be cut through and originate an equivalent transaction of A to C. which is totally valid in the system, allowing work with smaller blocks.

THIS CUT THROUGH ALLOWS SCALABILITY AND MORE PROCESSING SPEED WITHIN THE SYSTEM.

All that is needed is to prove the ownership of the UTXO (Unspent Transaction Output), and that it is the current value of the transaction and a blinding factor. So there is no need to store an address on the blockchain, the only thing that is recorded is the Commitment.

IT DOES NOT MATTER HOW MANY RESOURCES THE PEOPLE WHO WANT TO KNOW OR STEAL THE INFORMATION ON THE BLOCKCHAIN HAS. NO PERSONAL INFORMATION MAY BE STOLEN FROM THE PLATFORM. (Say goodbye to the dementors thieves).

It is important to note that in a blockchain the data can never be deleted, it can only be added. A compact blockchain does not imply data removal, it implies that only the information necessary to validate the entire blockchain is much smaller. A new node connected to the network can verify the entire blockchain by downloading only the block headers and the current status.

Marta in 2015 met the blockchain platform, she knew it was a decentralized technology with cryptographic features that make the whole system a very secure vault and she believed that she could save her money anonymously. Over the years she continued to exchange her fiat currency to crypto significantly increasing her savings on this platform. In the last quarter of 2017, she receives an email from a person without any identification, threatening to kidnap her family and her loved ones, if she did not provide the private key of her Wallet. Marta panicked, could not explain how someone could know the amount of money that she had in Bitcoin. She did not know who to ask for help or with whom to report, so she did not want to take the risk and gave the key with more than 80.000 $ (50 Bitcoins on that date). She said goodbye to this platform and did not want to know anything else about the crypto.

Her best friend knowing the potential of the Blockchain technology and how much it attracted Marta, nine months later introduce her Beam with a completely confidential platform, which allows anonymity within the network. Privacy for the information of the users and a secure system. Privacy implies freedom, Marta became free again and went back to the crypto ecosystem thanks to Beam.

Beam is the solution for those users who want anonymity within the platform. In addition, Beam offers peer-to-peer transactions that are scalable.

Beam allows each block to be more compact, thus creating a very light Blockchain. This results in the Blockchain architecture being faster and more scalable. All this is thanks to the MimbleWimble protocol upon which the network is built. No doubt Beam has come to improve the blockchain technology, providing security to platforms such as Bitcoin, and improving the performance and the scalability of the system.