What is BEAM?

Fuente

BEAM is a decentralized currency with great privacy, fungibility and scalability. BEAM transactions are private by default, and the storage of all transaction history is not necessary for block chain validation, which reduces the size of the block chain and improves scalability. BEAM will support many types of transactions, such as custody transactions, time-blocked transactions and atomic swaps. Our route map includes dozens of features and is constantly evolving. We are striving to make BEAM a definitive Store-of-Value currency.

Who maintains BEAM?

BEAM será mantenido por la Fundación sin fines de lucro BEAM basada en la comunidad. No hay ICO ni premonición. Tanto el equipo central como la fundación se financian a través de un mecanismo de recompensa de bloque, con un cierto porcentaje de monedas que se emiten desde cada bloque recién extraído.

UNDER THE HOOD: Mimblewimble

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

Mimblewimble focuses on
(a) Confidential Transactions and
(b) Transaction Cut – Through. [1]

(a) Confidential Transactions use cryptographic commitment scheme with two basic properties: hiding and binding.

It is similar to giving someone a closed safe box with some message inside that only you know the combination for. When time comes you can reveal the key and the person can make sure that your commitment is valid (blinding) while she can not know what is was before the key is received (hiding).

(b) Transaction Cut – Through:

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!

More in depth information about the protocol as it relates specifically to r values, range proofs and other technicalities can be reviewed in the Mimblewimble WhitePaper and in the Beam Position Paper.

Fuente

The technology

BEAM is based on Mimblewimble, an elegant protocol released by an anonymous developer in 2016. Named after a Harry Potter saga spell, Mimblewimble uses the Pedersen Commitment scheme for complete anonymity and zero knowledge range tests to guarantee the validity of the amounts of the transactions. To improve privacy and reduce the size of the block chain, Mimblewimble merges all the intermediate outputs into a single block and into several blocks, thus storing the current state of UTXO and making the size of the block chain smaller than in other leading currencies. The BEAM team implemented Mimblewimble from scratch using C ++. The BEAM blocks are extracted using the Equihash Proof-of-Work hard algorithm as the memory. The blocking time is 1 minute on average.