Beam Privacy

Beam is a proof of work cryptocurrency released in 2019. It is based on the MimbleWimble protocol, a modification of the bitcoin protocol optimized for privacy and scalability.
History and background
Before the release of Beam in January 2019, a few attempts were made to solve the common privacy issues of public blockchains.
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.
After several testnet releases in Q4 of 2018, Beam emerged on January 3, 2019 the first implementation of Mimblewimble. Beam has extended to integrate Confidential Assets and Dandelion alongside Lelantus-MW to address problems that could arise from transaction linkability, traceability, and de-anonymization.
Over its 3 years of existence, Beam, as a privacy cryptocurrency, has evolved into a confidential DeFi ecosystem following a hard fork on June 29, 2020 and the latest release of its Fermion version in February 2021.
Mechanism
With Mimblewimble, a blinding factor is generated in accordance with Pederson's Commitments that restricts the availability of transaction information like the source, content, and destination, to only parties involved in a transaction. Beam offers a by-default privacy while users have the discretion to decide what details they want to share with a chosen third party. Beam is built on the framework of theories developed by Adam Back and Greg Maxwell around confidential transactions - a type of that substitutes transaction amounts for a cryptographic commitment in the form of a cryptographic hash.
Beam uses multiple security audits by organizations like Kudelski Security LTD, Least Authority LTD, SmartDec LTD, and Pessimistic-io.
BEAM relies primarily on the Mimblewimble protocol Beam's Mimblewimble implementation is meant to improve the scalability by discarding the previous states of the network after a transaction is finalized, such that further computations are done with the .
To eliminate the possibility of de-anonymization attacks, Beam adapts additional privacy protocols - Dandelion and Lelantus-Mimblewimble for implementation on the Beam blockchain.
Mining and Network Consensus
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 important 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 miners. As part of Beam's proposition to achieve decentralization and maintain an inclusive state of the network, mining with <nowiki/>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.

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