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Pubic ledgers are an outstanding advance in terms of transparency and offer the opportunity to create decentralized self-governed organizations. Trust between parties no longer hinders the capacity to store and trade digital assets. But, individual privacy and security are not granted on a platform that does not protect the sensitive information that malicious parties could use to harm, extort, and blackmail users.

Also, if some company is willing to adopt crypto and use it as a mean of payment for its employees, having all the transaction history public could expose and harm the employees from that company. Furthermore, if information about the location of a company's investments is disclosed, it will lose its commercial advantage.

BEAM provides an interisting alternative to address privacy issue, and it does so with the added bonus of eliminating the privacy-scalability tradeoff.

What makes Bitcoin such a great success, and how can BEAM make it even better?

The Bitcoin Network contains a history of every transaction that has been made. In order to prove that each address balance is accurate, all validating nodes have to reach consensus on the accepted version of the transaction history. Nodes have to do so despite they don't trust each other nor they trust any third party outside the Network. The fact that this consensus is actually achieved every ten minutes is what made bitcoin one of a kind.

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While this is a really a great achievement, IT IS JUST NOT GOOD ENOUGH. Bitcoin was though as a private network, for that reason a very complicated and randomly generated private and public key pair is created for each wallet. But recent research shows that malicious users had found a way around to deanonymize Bitcoin wallets. By analyzing, mapping, and establishing relationships between cookies from users browsers and the public data on the blockchain, they can expose the identity of any user. The worst part is that once the identity of an address is exposed, all its past, present, and future transactions are compromised.

Here is where BEAM steps forward and creates a platform that addresses the main issues that satisfy the needs of all users, from individuals to corporate institutions. BEAM offers the ability to disclose information only to the ones authorized by the users preventing any future leakage of information. Also, a more light and compact blockchain is implemented thanks to the MimbleWimble protocol. This two characteristics alone make BEAM a guarantee for sustainable growth and a significant improvement in the overall user experience on the Crypto Ecosystem.

More privacy without a scalability tradeoff? Is MimbleWimble trully a magic spell?

Despite we all love magic, and we can amuse ourselves with funny animations. MimbleWimble is not a childish invention. It is an outstanding mathematical development applied to computer science. It is built upon two main concepts:

Confidential transactions & Transaction cut-trough

How can we get confidential transactions with MimbleWimble?

MimbleWimble uses a commitment scheme called Pedersen Commitment Scheme. To keep the explanation in layman's terms, Pedersen commitment provides the means to prove the ownership of some value and broadcast it to the public ledger, while revealing the actual quantity of the asset only to the receiver of the transaction. This gives the entire network the ability to check and prove the validity of each transaction while at the same time hiding the actual balance of each transaction.

How is blokchain's transaction data optimized with MimbleWimble?

Pedersen Commitment Scheme uses Elliptic Curve Cryptography of the form:

`C = r * G + v * H`

Where r is a secret ket (blinding factor), held by the owner of the asset, and is used to hide the real value v. G and H are the coordinates on some Elliptic curve. In order to transfer ownership of Unspent Transaction Outputs (UTXO) a sender needs to reveal v and r to the receiver, then the receiver has to generate a new blinding factor known only by him.

Therefore, each transaction input and output is a linear combination of the blinding factor r and the real value v. Thus, a set of identical transactions (those that has the same v value) from A to B and from B to C can be merged in a identical valid A to C transaction. Since the blockchain is a historic record of transactions, this method can be applied to the whole chain. Thus, current state validity can be proven storing only the current UTXO, and the block headers (which had used the Merkle Tree structure to prove its validity) instead of storing the whole transaction history. Thus, providing a more efficient and readily scalable blockchain.

What do we get adding all this up? The answer is just one word lenghth: BEAM

Let's have a glimpse on BEAM main Features

Confidentiality. All transactions are private. No information about transaction participants is stored in the blockchain.

Versatility. “Scriptless Script” technology allows implementation of a wide variety of transaction types beyond simple transmissions of value; for example, atomic swapping, escrow, and time-locked transactions.

Scalability. The “cut-through” feature of Mimblewimble helps to avoid excessive computational overhead, making the BEAM blockchain orders of magnitude smaller than any other blockchain implementation.

Sustainability. Open source, implemented from scratch, community-governed, and backed by the Beam Growth Pool: 20% of block mining rewards goes to this pool to incentivize development and promotion of BEAM.

Usability. A wallet for desktop and mobile, designed to support day-to-day usage for both individual and small business users. The built-in dashboard makes budget management easy, featuring actionable spend and earning insights.

Compatibility. An industry-proven Equihash algorithm was selected to ensure broad adoption by existing GPU miners. BEAM comes with an extensive set of tools for running and managing mining nodes.

_{Quotation source: BEAM webpage}

A personal use case

I will tell you about my real-life experience, not just a hypothetical scenario. My father is really skeptical when it comes to crypto. Recently I convinced him to create a Steem account because he loves to read, write an publish random photographs. But I have not been able to make him store some of his savings in crypto. He has all the money in an account that gives him no interest and even makes him lose some money due to maintenance fees. He said to me that he will not store his lifetime savings in some random platform where everyone can see to whom he sends funds and the total balance he owns. He said that he wouldn't expose any member of our family to senseless fighting because of inheritance affairs. I said to him that I don't want any of the money he has earned and I know that he trusts me... but guess what? My brother does not agree with this. He argues that I am trying to take advantage and some other senseless ideas. With BEAM I can finally introduce my father to the crypto ecosystem and make him enjoy all the benefits of this new economic system.

Final considerations

Even when thousands of crypto-related projects who address many fields of human society have been created (there are more than 1.5 thousand of altcoins listed on coinmarketcap), transacting without the need of a centralized third party and with high levels of security are the more relevant use cases for any cryptocurrency.

BEAM provides a highly secure platform where users privacy is the number one priority. Also, BEAM platform is designed to provide sustainable growth due to its crafty consensus protocol (MimbleWimble). It provides a really efficient Blockchain that can be implemented as a soft fork, a side chain, or it can be fully integrated with the actual Bitcoin Blockchain to guarantee that crypto will be always a censorship-proof ecosystem where people can be truly free.