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.
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.
