BEAM AND ITS MAGIC

The way in which we conceive money has been transformed. The entry into the scene of Bitcoin (the first implementation of the idea of peer to peer electronic cash system), almost ten years ago, transformed all known experiences until then. At the beginning of this year its transactions ranged from 400 to 500 per minute and it has a market capitalization of approximately 160 billion dollars. Its rapid evolution has stunned the markets, and this thanks to the technology on which the virtual currencies have been created: the blockchain.

The blockchain technology consists of an ordered list of interlaced data blocks that store transactions between users. This tool is revolutionizing the future of the economy and society by its transformative potential, both in industry and services and in social relations. More and more people are relying on a system that promises greater freedom for its users by not depending on a centralized entity.

Now, what other demand do users have? We all want freedom, but also privacy and confidentiality. We have always had the need to safeguard our real identity; something that has not been possible in transactions in the Bitcoin network. By having permeability in the network it is possible to link the identity of a person with commercial movements since their data are open and permanently stored in a public accounting book. There is an advantage in using this technology, it allows you to store data in a secure, immutable, decentralized and transparent manner. But, on the other hand, it is still a slow system, not scalable, with limited storage capacity and privacy problems.

I present to you BEAM, a decentralized currency of great privacy and scalability. BEAM is designed to comply with the right of users to have financial privacy. It maintains the benefits of an immutable and incorruptible blockchain system, but no information is stored about the participants of the transaction in the blockchain. Therefore, BEAM is the solution that offers true anonymity and scalable peer-to-peer transactions.

BEAM is based on a protocol called Mimblewimble. Maybe some of you remember the "tongue-tying curse" (Mimble Wimble), which appears in the Harry Potter books. With the spell, the victim's tongue was immobilized so he would not talk about a certain subject. As the developer of this protocol says: "I call my creation Mimblewimble because it is used to prevent blockchain from talking about all the user's information"

Mimblewimble leverages previous concepts like Confidential Transactions and "one-way aggregate signatures" (OWAS) to provide private transactions and better scalability. It purposes to give network users greater privacy through transactions with multiple inputs and outputs, which will make it difficult to track the addresses of users. And in terms of scalability, the platform proposes generating aggregate one-way signatures. That is, to constitute a platform where you only need to validate the moment in which a transaction was made or entered.

MimbleWimble uses a well known commitment scheme called Pedersen Commitment that achieves this using Elliptic Curve Cryptography and is of the form C = r * G + v * H

Where r is a blinding factor, a secret key hiding the real value and G and H are generator point on a specific elliptic curve.

Pedersen commitments are cryptographic algorythms that allow a prover to commit to a certain value without revealing it or being able to change it. Confidential transactions are implemented through this cryptographic commitment scheme that has two basic properties: hidig and binding.

As you already know, a block in a blockschain is a large list of transactions that contains its inputs and outputs, and multiple blocks can also appear creating a large transaction. These can be "cut" thanks to the linearity property of the Pedersen Commitments. They say: "If we have two identical transactions: from A to B, and then from B to C, we can cut the intermediate transaction, resulting in a merged transaction from A to C, which is a valid transaction in the system." Cutting down the amount of data required to store and verify transaction data allows Mimblewimble to work with smaller blocks. Transactions are mixed, but no data is ever deleted from the blockchain.

Through an article like this it is very difficult to fully understand the operation of BEAM. That's why I invite you to take a look at the lincks that follow below. In them you will find detailed information about this new project and how you can be part of its magic.