BEAM: PRIVACY AT ITS MAXIMUM

mgel (47)in #crypto • 6 years ago

Since the emergence of Bitcoin, the world at large has given birth to large amounts of cryptocurrencies and improved options for trading and blockchains. Each of these cryptographic options has arisen due to the need to have secure and reliable transactions. Till date, Bitcoin is still by far the leading digital currency and no doubt about it that, bitcoin is still the first option, due to its validity and strength in the market.

Privacy is an utmost concern of an individual/company hereby making people very passionate and concerned about how to carry out a transaction and store their money in a way that is very secure without depending on intermediaries like banks, governments, and other centralized authority and their monetary policies. Bitcoin as clearly stated, has started an entire revolution, but it is yet to be perfected when it comes to one of its’ core use cases which is the private transferring of assets in a peer to peer fashion as indicated above.

Yes for sure, Blockchains such as Bitcoin make it possible for people to track data and narrow down the source and end point of transactions making it possible to eventually track back to the party involved in the transaction by analyzing the blockchain which is publicly available for all to see but it should be noted that blockchains themselves are very bulky and computationally heavy thereby making them inefficient as well as prone to scalability issues as they grow to meet the global demand wish in turn doesn't meet human requirement.

How would you love a C++ network been made from the scratch scaled to accommodate mass adoption while still maintaining reasonable block sizes and allowing full control over privacy simply for the purpose of reversing the defect stated above. It is of great joy I introduce to you Beam.

INTRODUCING BEAM

_{Introducing Beam}

Beam is a decentralized and a next generation confidential cryptocurrency which works based on a forward looking MimbleWimble protocol with very strong privacy, scalability and fungibility allowing the user total control over the privacy of information and which should be available or unavailable.

MIND CAPTIVATING FEATURES OF BEAM AND ITS FUNCTIONS

The advantages of Beam cannot be over emphasized but a few will be discussed below. While maintaining the benefits of an immutable and incorruptible blockchain system such as Bitcoin, Beam is also built with scalability and features in mind which are as follows;

PRIVACY

_Privacy

This is one of the vast advantages of Beam because it grants users the full charge of their personal data and gives them the ability to do anything they want in agreement to their will and applicable law. Therefore, the availability of information and to which party it is readily accessible to, is decided by users. With Beam, each operation is totally private and the information is not exposed of any of the users that operate through this protocol in the Blockchain.

SCALABILITY;

_Scalability

This is another advantage of the Beam as it is based on Mimblewimble which has a smaller blocks than any other blockchain, giving it maximum scalability. It’s a faster and more efficient network. Its scalability allows a decrease in the blockchain, this does not excite a computational overload in operations leaving space for another chain.

POWER;

_Power

This is also another important condition to take note of because Beam gives users control over which transaction information is shared, and to whom it is shared with without any form of restrainment and also gives the power to conceal transaction values and also concealing addresses of both the sender and receiver for the sake of privacy.

MULTIFUNCTION

Beam enables multiple transaction types in a private manner: escrow, time locked, atomic swaps and also make a leaner blockchain with fewer transaction details per transaction: enabling faster confirmations and therefore very efficient scaling. Etc.

Manage mining nodes broadly supported by tools that execute it. Its Equihash algorithm adapts to most GPU equipment making its compatibility 100% reliable.
It has a very useful wallet for computers and mobile devices giving the user greater access and usability without restrictions, through its integrated panel offering valuable information in an easy way to the user.

MIMBLEWIBLE THE TECHNOLOGY BEYIND BEAM

Mimblewimble is a protocol published by an anonymous author; much like the famous Satoshi Nakamoto; creator of Bitcoin.

MimbleWimble works based on two concepts which includes:

Confidential Transactions
Transaction Cut-Through.

CONFIDENTIAL TRANSACTIONS

It makes use of cryptographic commitment scheme which is backed with two fundamental properties which are hiding and binding. This can be described as not been different from giving someone a safe box which is closed and which has some messages inside of it, that no other person but you know the combination for it. You can disclose the key at a proper time, and as long as the person can't know what the message was before receiving the key, he can make sure that your commitment is well grounded. The popular commitment scheme known as Pedersen commitment, which is achieved by the use of Elliptic Curve Cryptography is what MimbleWimble make do with. It is in the form below.

C = r * G + v * H

Where;
C is a Pedersen commitment
r is a blinding factor
v is a secret key hiding the real value
G & H are generator point on a specific elliptic curve.

TRANSACTION CUT-THROUGH

The combination of two factors in a linear form makes up each input and output of a transaction. A block in a block chain is a large list of transactions and can be thought of as one large transaction to be “cut through” (combining all the transactions in between A-Z). Applying this principle even further from individual blocks to the entire blockchain creates a system that only needs the current state of transactions instead of the entire history of all transactions as they occurred (which is how Bitcoin works).

With this system, unspent transactions outputs (a transaction received by a user which has persisted in the blockchain) can be proved to belong to the receiving user via the value of the message and the value of the blinding factor. After creating the transaction, only the commitment is recorded on the blockchain; not the addresses of the users or the amounts exchanged.

Cutting down the amount of data required to store and verify transaction data allows Mimblewimble to work with smaller blocks.

Beam Use-Case

CASE ONE

An investment bank "Radiant Private Investment Company" that deals with the rendering of various services that are related to finance to individuals, institutions, corporations, and governments have been in operation for some years now, and are well recognised for their services. They are experts in financial investments in relation to cryptocurrencies. However, they got to find out that most of the financial documents or informations of the company that are meant to be private are becoming a common entity for the general public. With this case, the challenge that Radiant Private Investment Company face is that,the capitalisation table of the company which gives analysis of the company's equity dilution, percentages of ownership, as well as the value of equity which the investors, founders and other owners has in each round of investment. Another issue is that the salaries of employees are now publicly associated with addresses that can easily be traced by other people. With the knowledge and help of Beam, the company can make sure crucial and private informations about the company are not accessible by the public.

CASE TWO

John Bello works for an accounting firm CryptoAccounting Inc. They are well known for being at the fore front of new technologies and they are experts in accounting as it relates to cryptocurrencies.

John Bello is the head finance engineer responsible for applying the most up to date technologies to their accounting practices.

One of the issues that CryptoAccounting Inc. faces is the limitation of choice when it comes to privacy. While their corporate clients want to broadcast their business transactions to their investors, they want to keep individual employee salaries private. Existing blockchain solutions put employees at risk of breach of privacy.

This is when John Bello found out about Beam. With Beam, companies can control transparency at a corporate level while retaining privacy for their employees. With Beam, companies can use one layer of blockchain technology to handle their finances instead of depending on a combination of cryptocurrencies.

CONCLUSION

Beam relies on Mimblewimble to allow users to send and receive money securely and privately. This feature makes the platform the ideal tool to make investments, the ability to operate with different levels of security allows us to adapt to the set of laws of the countries in which it is being invested. Additionally, it gives investors the possibility to keep the investments made in technological development or first-hand innovations a secret.

Beam is one more step towards the evolution of cryptocurrency exchange systems, a system that establishes and fortifies this as one of the most important economic values that will intervene more and more in the world and that will end up laying the foundations for a change in our society.

THE BEAM ROADMAP