Beam is a project that quietly enters our lives but creates an extremely solid privacy coin. Since the money was launched, it has attracted great attention from the markets.
Beam is a Mimblewimble-based cryptocurrency that is not only privacy-focused but also scalable. While giving its users full control over their data, it is also successful in terms of performance. The Beam coin was launched in January 2019. In this article, we will give information about why you should choose Beam Coin, its prominent features and the underlying Mimblewimble protocol.
Why Beam?
In order to answer this question, it is useful to first look at other Mimblewimble protocols.
Beam Coin is one of many new cryptocurrencies based on the Mimblewimble protocol and was created to help fill shortcomings in existing privacy coins such as ZCash and Monero. Beam has several features that claim to be a superior cryptocurrency.
Strong Privacy Controls
Stronger privacy controls are at the top of the Beam’s list of features. Other privacy coins appear to define a privacy model that makes transactions private only when specifically requested, rather than adding privacy by default.
Beam, in contrast, makes every transaction private by default. This means that users are the only one who can determine what information is made public and users retain full control of their personal data.
Beam also, as an additional privacy feature; formed the concepts of hidden transactions and hidden assets. This feature will allow the creation of new digital asset types such as debt instruments, real estate assets, new currencies, all of which can be easily exchanged specifically on the Beam platform.
While other blockchains struggle with scalability issues, the Beam team believes they have solved the problem with a lean and compact blockchain. The processes are designed to prevent bloating using the Mimblewimble protocol.
This will not only reduce bloat, but also reduce computational overhead demands and thus increase network scalability. Beam is designed to support various transaction types using Scriptless Script technology. Besides simple value transfers, Beam; It also supports time-based transfers, atomic swaps and escrow payments.
Privacy will remain the top priority, but this feature will also comply with current regulations with the support of immutable digital wallet signatures.
What Are Confidential Transactions?
Confidential transactions have the feature of hiding and blinding. The use of confidential transactions allows users to hide or blind any information about the transactions. This means that only the sender and recipient know the transaction amounts.
This is achieved by using blinding factors to encode transaction amounts. Blinding works by assigning a random value and multiplying the actual amount of transactions by that random value. A single multi-signature is created covering all inputs and outputs in the transaction.
Receiver randomly chooses a few blinding factors when the transaction is received. These can then be used as proof of ownership when it comes time to spend the cryptocurrencies.
What is MimbleWimble?
Any topic related to Beam requires first an understanding of Mimblewimble technology, which is the foundation of Beam. Mimblewimble is based on the Bitcoin protocol but has been modified to increase privacy and efficiency of the network.
Transaction recipients in the Mimblewimble protocol can create a blanking factor when signing a transaction. This is possible through the use of a combination of Pedersen Commitments and Confidential Transactions. Mimblewimbles provides a privacy and scalable blockchain protocol based on the transaction generation method.
Mimblewimble solves this problem by eliminating scripting, although hidden processes need additional evidence for each transaction, making them burdensome. It then combines blinding factors with fake outputs to achieve the confidentiality and security levels of Confidential Transactions without associated performance issues.
Within Mimblewimble blocks, transactions look like a random mix of outputs and inputs. This allows nodes to sync faster as they only need to validate certain new entries rather than the entire blockchain.
Blockchain grows slower, avoids bloating and makes full nodes run more efficiently; thus improving the long-term decentralization of the network.
Protection of Beam’s Personal Data
Unlike almost every blockchain in existence, Beam is trying to replace the system that records transfers and token ownership by address.
Removal of all personal information related to a transaction
In addition, Beam also uses a regular expiry interval of 24 hours. This can be changed in the wallet settings, and Beam developers recommend users to create new recipient addresses for each transaction.
Result
Beam is one of the first full Mimblewimble apps and provides significant improvements in efficiency and privacy.
While Beam has not been on the cryptocurrency scene long since the first Mimblewimble whitepaper was published in the world in 2016, it was almost inevitable that it emerged. Indeed, Riccardo Spagni, one of the developers of Monero, one of Beam’s biggest competitors, emphasized that the Mimblewimble privacy technology is quite “impressive” and expressed his respect for the underlying technology of Beam.