Beam Privacy
Script error: No such module "Draft topics". Script error: No such module "AfC topic"..[1]
| Beam Privacy | |
|---|---|
| Development | |
| White paper | Beam Whitepaper |
| Implementation(s) | Mimblewimble |
| Initial release | V.1.0(Agile Atom) / January 2019 |
| Latest release | February 2022 |
| Code repository | Github Repository |
| Development status | Active |
| Written in | C++ |
| Operating system | Windows, MacOS, Linux, Mobile, Web Wallet |
| Developer(s) | Dev Team |
| Source model | Proof-of-Work |
| License | MIT Apache 2.0 |
| Website | Beam.mw |
| Ledger | |
| Timestamping scheme | Proof-of-Work |
| Block reward | 40 BEAM |
| Block time | 1 Minute |
| Block explorer | Beam Explorer |
| Circulating supply | 109,8522,160 (March 2022) |
| Supply limit | 262,800,000 |
| Valuation | |
| Market cap | US$39,206,162 |
Search Beam Privacy on Amazon.
Beam[2] [3]is a privacy-focused[4] blockchain that uses cryptography to ensure the integrity and confidentiality of users' information. Through its implementation of the Mimblewimble protocol[5] - a modification of the bitcoin protocol optimized for privacy and scalability, Beam achieves a higher level of privacy and maintains scalability by applying advanced tricks to public-key cryptography.
With Mimblewimble, a blinding factor is generated in accordance with Pederson’s Commitments[6] that restricts the availability of transaction information like the source, content, and destination, to only parties involved in a transaction. Beam achieves this level of privacy through complex computations and mathematical operations involving the transaction amount and private/public keys such that transactions are verified without revealing their actual values, sources, or destinations[6]. In other words, the possibility of malicious attacks from information available to third parties is highly reduced (if not eliminated). Unlike other privacy-focused blockchains where privacy is made optional with opt-in features, privacy[1] on Beam is by default while users have the discretion to decide what details they want to share with a chosen 3rd party[5] . Beam is built on the framework of theories developed by Adam Back and Greg Maxwell around confidential transactions[7] - a type of that substitutes transaction amounts for a cryptographic commitment in the form of a cryptographic hash.
Furthermore, Beam ensured users’ safety through multiple security audits by reputable organizations like Kudelski Security LTD, Least Authority LTD, SmartDec LTD, and Pessimistic-io.
Background[edit]
Following Bitcoin's release in 2009, lots of privacy concerns arose from the pseudonymous nature of transactions on the blockchain. Despite being touted as a peer-to-peer, transparent, and secure network, Bitcoin is riddled with privacy loopholes that pose a potential threat to its users.
Transactions on the Bitcoin network leave traceable trails on the block explorer that can reveal useful information about the source, content, and recipient of transactions[8].
Before the emergence of Beam in January 2019, attempts were made by projects like Monero and Zcash, to solve the privacy issue of public blockchains. However, they both had their particular limitations which came mostly from trade-offs between privacy and Scalability[9].
In August 2016, the Mimblewimble whitepaper highlighting the framework for a blockchain protocol built to enable privacy and Scalability was published by a pseudonymous creator who goes by the moniker Tom Elvis Jedusor (the French name of fictional Harry Potter character, Voldemort[10]). Interestingly, both the author’s name and the term "Mimblewimble" are drawn from the popular book series, Harry Potter [11]
"Mimblewimble'' as used in the series represents a “Tongue-tying Curse'' used in the Harry Potter series to prevent disclosure of secrets[11]. Little wonder it became the choice representation of privacy for the pseudonymous creator of the Mimblewimble protocol- the very protocol that would later service the Beam blockchain.
After several testnet releases in Q4 of 2018, Beam emerged on January 3rd, 2019 the first implementation of Mimblewimble[12]. Ranking above Grin, Monero, and Zcash in terms of privacy model and network scalability[11]. Furthermore, Beam has extended to integrate Confidential Assets and Dandelion alongside Lelantus-MW to address problems that could arise from transaction linkability, traceability, and deanonymization.
Over its 3 years of existence, Beam has evolved from a stellar start as a privacy cryptocurrency, to become a confidential DeFi ecosystem following a hard fork[13] on June 29th, 2020[14][15] and the latest release of its Fierce Femion version. Also, Beam has a team of high-profile leaders and experts with vast industry experience. The team's commitment to building a resilient and confidential DeFi ecosystem has led the Beam project through many notable milestones which are all captured in an exhaustive roadmap. Starting from the initial release of the Agile Atom in January 2019 to the recent Fierce Fermion release of February 2021.
Key Performance Features[edit]
BEAM relies primarily on the Mimblewimble protocol[16] to achieve confidential transactions with a decent level of anonymity and scalability[16][17]. The big catch with the Mimblewimble implementation on Beam is the infrastructure it provides to validate transactions and solve the double-spend problem, while hiding sensitive transaction details like the sender, receiver, and amount, from third parties[18]. Beam’s Mimblewimble implementation improves scalability by discarding the previous states of the network after a transaction is finalized, such that further computations are done with the Unspent Transaction Output (UTXO)[19].
However, the privacy offered by the Mimblewimble protocol alone is still vulnerable to deanonymization attacks. Despite hiding transaction details, bad actors could establish linkages to where transactions originated from by tracing IP addresses and transaction graphs to uncover the faces behind each hidden transaction[20]. To eliminate the possibility of such attacks, Beam adapts additional privacy protocols - Dandelion and Lelantus- to Mimblewimble for implementation on the Beam blockchain.
- Dandelion was proposed by Glulia Fanti as a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) to bring more privacy to the bitcoin blockchain[21]. The implementation of Dandelion on the Beam blockchain hides the source of transactions by creating random paths to route transactions IP addresses within its stem phase, before publishing them on the network in its fluff phase[22]. The randomized routing system in the stem phase unbundles transaction IP addresses from their origin and makes it infeasible for bad actors to successfully launch a deanonymization attack.
- Lelantus-MW on the other end is an adaptation of the Lelantus protocol to the Mimblewimble protocol for implementation on the Beam blockchain[23]. The Lelantus-MW hybrid on Beam blockchain provides an extra privacy infrastructure for anonymous and confidential transfer of value on the Beam blockchain in three ways: ledger indistinguishability, transaction non-malleability, and balance[24][23].
It provides a means to obfuscate the transaction graph and prevent observers from establishing linkages between Transaction Outputs (TXOs). The Lelantus-MW protocol merges shielded TXOs into a pool with a 64k anonymity set[20] which makes it practically infeasible to trace the original transaction. The Unspent Transaction Output (UTXO) from this pool can then be spent privately and verified through a balance method that prevents double-spending according to the proposition of Groth in his 2015 paper[25]
Mining and Network Consensus[edit]
Beam operates a Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus algorithm just like Bitcoin. Miners contribute computing power to maintain the network and earn rewards for successfully updating the network with new blocks of transactions. At present, one distinguishing feature of Beam's PoW is its use of Beam Hash III - a modification of the Equihash algorithm- to foster verification and agreement between network nodes.
At its early stage, mining operation on Beam was restricted to Central Processing Unit (CPU) and Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) miners. As part of Beam's proposition to achieve decentralization and maintain an inclusive state of the network, mining with Application-specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) was restricted for the first 18 months post-mainnet launch. This was done specifically to balance the trade-off between a democratic distribution of the Beam token through CPU/GPU miners, and leveraging the attack-resistant characteristic of ASIC mining for network security.
References[edit]
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 "What to Expect at G-20: Money Laundering and Crypto Discussion". finance.yahoo.com. Retrieved 2022-03-22.
- ↑ Pollock, Darryn. "Indeed.com And Glassdoor Parent Company Invests in Privacy-Coin Project Beam". Forbes. Retrieved 2022-03-24.
- ↑ Shin, Laura. "How Businesses Might One Day Use Cryptocurrency". Forbes. Retrieved 2022-03-24.
- ↑ "Top 5 Privacy Coins: Features and Differences". cryptonews.com. Retrieved 2022-03-22.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 Silveira, Adrián; Betarte, Gustavo; Cristiá, Maximiliano; Luna, Carlos (2021-04-01). "A Formal Analysis of the MimbleWimble Cryptocurrency Protocol". arXiv:2104.00822 [cs].
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 Pedersen, Torben Pryds (1992). Feigenbaum, Joan, ed. "Non-Interactive and Information-Theoretic Secure Verifiable Secret Sharing". Advances in Cryptology — CRYPTO ’91. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer: 129–140. doi:10.1007/3-540-46766-1_9. ISBN 978-3-540-46766-3.
- ↑ Noether, Shen; Mackenzie, Adam; Lab, the Monero Research (2016-12-21). "Ring Confidential Transactions". Ledger. 1: 1–18. doi:10.5195/ledger.2016.34. ISSN 2379-5980.
- ↑ Wall, Eric (2019-07-23). "Privacy and Cryptocurrency, Part III: Should You Use a Privacy Coin?". Human Rights Foundation (HRF). Retrieved 2022-03-22.
- ↑ Wall, Eric (2019-07-23). "Privacy and Cryptocurrency, Part III: Should You Use a Privacy Coin?". Human Rights Foundation (HRF). Retrieved 2022-03-22.
- ↑ "Lord Voldemort". www.cs.mcgill.ca. Retrieved 2022-03-23.
- ↑ 11.0 11.1 11.2 Silveira, Adrián; Betarte, Gustavo; Cristiá, Maximiliano; Luna, Carlos (2021-09-04). "A Formal Analysis of the Mimblewimble Cryptocurrency Protocol". Sensors (Basel, Switzerland). 21 (17): 5951. doi:10.3390/s21175951. ISSN 1424-8220. PMC 8434605 Check
|pmc=value (help). PMID 34502842 Check|pmid=value (help). - ↑ Kim, Christine (2019-01-03). "The First Cryptocurrency to Use Mimblewimble Privacy Tech Is Now Live". www.coindesk.com. Retrieved 2022-03-22.
- ↑ "Beam announces first hard fork". finance.yahoo.com. Retrieved 2022-03-22.
- ↑ "Beam 6.0 Hardfork Aims to Bring Better Privacy to DeFi". finance.yahoo.com. Retrieved 2022-03-22.
- ↑ "'Everything Will Move to Confidential DeFi' Beam's CEO Says". Cointelegraph. 2020-07-04. Retrieved 2022-03-22.
- ↑ 16.0 16.1 Silveira, Adrián; Betarte, Gustavo; Cristiá, Maximiliano; Luna, Carlos (2021-04-01). "A Formal Analysis of the MimbleWimble Cryptocurrency Protocol". arXiv:2104.00822 [cs].
- ↑ Kim, Christine (2019-01-03). "The First Cryptocurrency to Use Mimblewimble Privacy Tech Is Now Live". www.coindesk.com. Retrieved 2022-03-22.
- ↑ Angus, Sullivan (2018-12-11). "About Dandelion and Mimblewimble". BEAM Privacy. Retrieved 2022-03-22. Unknown parameter
|url-status=ignored (help) - ↑ "What Is UTXO?". Investopedia. Retrieved 2022-03-22.
- ↑ 20.0 20.1 Angus, Sullivan (2020-10-15). "Beam: The Best in Privacy". BEAM Privacy. Retrieved 2022-03-22.
- ↑ Bojja Venkatakrishnan, Shaileshh; Fanti, Giulia; Viswanath, Pramod (2017-06-13). "Dandelion: Redesigning the Bitcoin Network for Anonymity". Proceedings of the ACM on Measurement and Analysis of Computing Systems. 1 (1): 22:1–22:34. doi:10.1145/3084459.
- ↑ bitcoin/bips, Bitcoin, 2022-03-22, retrieved 2022-03-22
- ↑ 23.0 23.1 Fauzi, Prastudy; Meiklejohn, S.; Mercer, R.; Orlandi, Claudio (2018). "QuisQuis: A New Design for Anonymous Cryptocurrencies". IACR Cryptol. ePrint Arch. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-34578-5_23.
- ↑ Herskind, Lasse; Katsikouli, Panagiota; Dragoni, Nicola (May 2020). "Oscausi-practical private electronic cash from lelantus and mimblewimble". Journal of Internet Services and Information Security. 10 (2): 16–34. doi:10.22667/JISIS.2020.05.31.016. ISSN 2182-2069.
- ↑ Groth, Jens; Kohlweiss, Markulf (2015-04-15). "One-Out-of-Many Proofs: Or How to Leak a Secret and Spend a Coin". Advances in Cryptology - EUROCRYPT 2015 - 34th Annual International Conference on the Theory and Applications of Cryptographic Techniques, Sofia, Bulgaria, April 26-30, 2015, Proceedings, Part II. Springer: 253–280. doi:10.1007/978-3-662-46803-6_9.
External Links[edit]
Twitter | Telegram | Discord | Reddit | Medium | YouTube
This article "Beam Privacy" is from Wikipedia. The list of its authors can be seen in its historical and/or the page Edithistory:Beam Privacy. Articles copied from Draft Namespace on Wikipedia could be seen on the Draft Namespace of Wikipedia and not main one.
