10 questions about Beam's hardest core, we asked Beam's CEO

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Carbon chain value

(ID: cc-value), author: Tang Han, reprinted by Odaily with authorization.

Interviewee: Beam CEO Alex

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Several questions about the MimbleWimble protocol

Carbon chain value: Regarding CT-Confidential Transaction: Since this technology has greatly changed the transaction data structure, it has not been directly included in the new version of Bitcoin, but has been used in the side chain. How is Beam different from Bitcoin sidechains? Where are the advantages and disadvantages?

Alex: First of all, Beam based on the MimbleWimble protocol is not a side chain of Bitcoin, but a new independent currency.

Second, there are indeed people in the community who are trying to build a MimbleWimble sidechain and add it to Bitcoin. However, this approach will not change the main chain. Its side chain is privacy-protected, but the main chain still does not protect privacy. When you want to use the side chain for a secret bitcoin transaction, you need to transfer the bitcoin from the main chain to the side chain, and when the transaction is completed, you may need to transfer the bitcoin from the side chain to the main chain. Therefore, this approach cannot protect privacy in essence, and it is not very convenient to operate.

We believe privacy is very important. In the future, all currencies may take privacy into account to some extent. Bitcoin is also adopting these methods to improve its privacy protection, but it is still difficult for it to achieve this. After all, Beam solves this problem at layer 1, but Bitcoin's side chain solves this problem at layer 2.

Carbon chain value: We cannot directly add the MimbleWimble protocol to Bitcoin.

Alex: Yes. MimbleWimble is unscripted, but Bitcoin is scripted. If MimbleWimble is to be added to Bitcoin, it may be necessary to eliminate all Bitcoin scripts, which may result in the inability to conduct transactions between accounts. It's not realistic to do this.

Carbon chain value: Beam sender and receiver both participate in the process of creating transactions, which is completely different from Bitcoin. This approach avoids revealing the receiver's address, but makes it necessary for the sender to contact the receiver in some way. Beam includes a secure BBS system (separate from the Beam blockchain) that enables senders and receivers to securely exchange their Pedersen commitments. However, is this BBS system centralized? Can this BBS system guarantee user privacy and transaction security?

Alex: This BBS system is decentralized. You can imagine it as such a picture: the entire communication information on the BBS is segmented and stored on different nodes, and different nodes serve as complements for each other. After one node is broken, other nodes will get the data Autofill. On the whole, it is a complete hash table (Hash Table).

If we want to use a more concrete example to illustrate this, we can use an analogy-you know BitTorrent, right? The data on BitTorrent is not stored in the company's servers, but in individual nodes, and these nodes only store a certain part of the overall data, which is similar to sharding. In general, you can understand the storage of communication data in this way. This storage is decentralized, and the data is not owned by a central node.

Carbon chain value: Therefore, although Beam traders must be online at the same time when trading, Beam itself does not store the information of the dialogue between the two parties, and Beam does not force both parties to use the software for transaction communication. But are these exchanges publicly available?

Alex: First of all, I want to explain that these traders do not need to be online at the same time when trading, as long as they can connect within two hours.

At the same time, the communication between traders is not direct, but is done through a bulletin board system. For example, I want to initiate a transaction with you, and I will also send you a message at the same time. After you see this message, you need to send me the address of the message, and then I will upload it to the bulletin board system.

This Bully Board system is public and not privately owned by Beam's development team. Then, the information on the system itself is encrypted. Except for the parties to the transaction, no one else knows what information is on it, and even the Beam development team itself does not know what is on it.

Carbon chain value: About the Dandelion Protocol: In MimbleWimble, a node sends a transaction in two steps. First, the transaction is sent one-to-one to the next node. After passing through several nodes, the transaction is broadcast, and miners verify and package it into the block. This makes it more difficult for listening nodes to figure out how the transaction occurred, and to distinguish the original node that sent the transaction. However, does this make it harder for attackers to detect their attacks?

Alex: The Dandelion privacy protocol has nothing to do with the security of the entire network. The Dandelion Protocol talks about this: before this protocol, you would broadcast the transaction directly to the entire network, so that everyone would know where the source of the transaction is; with the Dandelion Protocol, you would send the transaction to The next node, the next node will send it to the next node until a certain node broadcasts to the whole network. In this way, if someone wants to trace back who is the original node that issued the transaction, it will become very difficult.

Carbon chain value: In this case, will it be more difficult to find the attacker?

Alex: According to my understanding, the attack you mentioned is not at the transaction level, but at the mining level. In this way, tracking such an attack means finding nodes that support some kind of fork. As with other networks such as Bitcoin, we can approach this with a similar analysis, and it won't make a huge difference.

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About Beam and Grin

Carbon chain value: BEAM provides traditional confidential transactions (using Bulletproof signatures), and BEAM also proposes an auditable wallet design. Selecting the auditable feature allows businesses or other users to generate unique public/private key pairs that allow external third parties to verify funds or any other metadata stored in transactions (e.g., other documents or digital assets). The Grin team explicitly chose not to expand beyond the core functionality. How do you feel about these two different options?

Alex: I think the reason why we and Grin made different choices is because of our different concepts and ideologies. Grin is more idealistic, it is more like a product of anarchism and cypherpunk movement. You know, what they want is a world without government, without taxes, and even a world without order. They are also supporting this vision with their technology, which is my understanding of Grin. ——They want to create a new world, and they are not willing to compromise with the existing system.

In beam's view, the government will not disappear so soon, and taxation will exist for a long time. ——Just some time ago, I also heard that Ernst & Young launched a cryptocurrency tax calculation tool. So what I want to say is that you can have that ideal, but you also have to take into account the reality. No matter how you look at it, it doesn't look like the US government is about to disintegrate, right? If you run afoul of the government, well, they'll put you in jail. You can also believe in Bitcoin or Grin in prison, but it is difficult for you to use it. this is the truth.

Grin is more idealistic and anarchic; we are more pragmatic and focus on solving real problems. Such differences—idealists and practicalists—are visible throughout the cryptocurrency world, which also determines that our views on many things will be different, and the way we deal with them will also be different. For example, they have always insisted on using the open source community, while we have chosen the form of a company to develop our own cryptocurrency.

Idealism may be more suitable to be spread as a story at the beginning, but there are not only idealists in the world, but also realists, to aim at their goals and do things down-to-earth. In the end, people who agree with each other will make the choice they think is right.

Carbon chain value: Do you think Beam and Grin are competitors? How do you view the fire of Grin in China some time ago?

Alex: Yes, we are competitors in a sense because we both adopted MimbleWimble, so people need to choose between us. Some people like Grin, some prefer Beam.

At the same time, I think it is a good thing that there is not only one project on this track. You know, we started speaking out last August, and I think it's because of Grin that we've grown so fast because we know there's a competitor here. Otherwise Beam could take a long time to complete and the experience for everyone could be worse. Right now there are two projects here, both competing with each other with ideas, but everything is open source. So if we have a good idea, they quickly understand and learn it from a technical point of view, and it motivates us to do what we think is right.

You know, that's how we make progress. If you have competition, then you know you can't just sit still. You need to move faster. Although Grin has made many statements about the relationship between Beam and Grin, I don't know what they really think inside. From my perspective, I think we do need some competitors.

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The Privacy Coin Market, Tracking Companies and Governments

Carbon chain value: In addition to rivals born at the same time like Grin, Beam also faces competition from various anonymous coins such as Zcash and Monero on the anonymous coin track. What do you think of the entire privacy coin market?

Alex: I think more and more people will start to understand that they need privacy. An interesting example is Wikipedia, which is sort of an anti-government organization and accepts bitcoin donations. Wikipedia believes that Bitcoin can protect transaction privacy, but in fact in the Bitcoin network, no matter what you do, this transaction record will always exist. Unfortunately, with current technology, it is very easy to track transactions on the Bitcoin network. Two or three years ago, when people used Bitcoin, they were in a fairy tale world, thinking that this world would protect their privacy. But in reality the opposite is true: transactions on Bitcoin are open to everyone, and it is even less private than a bank. Because at the bank, at least you don't know the transaction information on my account. In Bitcoin, everyone knows everyone's transactions. Sounds crazy, right? More and more people are starting to understand this, and more and more projects are working hard to solve privacy problems in different fields.

So I think that at least half of the projects in the future encryption ecosystem should be privacy-related, and there will be even more. This is not to say that there will be more Grin, in fact, a more likely scenario is that privacy-related technologies continue to emerge. As people increasingly understand that money and assets must be private, they turn to privacy-friendly cryptocurrencies in different ways.

Carbon chain value: According to your meaning, do you think Bitcoin will not be the last digital currency we use every day?

Alex: I think that the cryptocurrency that is really used by the public should be private. You know, Bitcoin could end up being a store of value sort of thing where people just occasionally transact on the network and it's harder to trace. However, if we consider using cryptocurrency to make payments or run a business for everyday life, it must be private.

Carbon chain value: So Bitcoin is a kind of digital gold, but it is not a very good digital cash.

Alex: Yeah, I can't say it's a great digital gold, because gold also needs to be private. Suppose I am a gold holder, I don't want everyone to know how much gold I have, especially if I have a lot of gold. After all, a big tree attracts the wind. If everyone knows about my wealth, then someone will get my idea and try to take it away by force. Ideally, everything should be private.

However, Bitcoin is the world's first cryptocurrency and has been tested for ten years, so it will not be easy to replace Bitcoin. But I think there will be more and more privacy-related cryptocurrencies, and they may eventually account for half of the entire cryptocurrency system. This trend of thought will launch an impact on the existing cryptocurrency landscape.

Carbon chain value: what do you think about Zcash and Monero? They are also very strong competitors.

Alex: Of course, for us, Zcash and Monero are two very strong competitors. Technically, Monroe is probably better because everything about them is confidential or private. But there are two sides to everything, and Monero doesn't do well in terms of scalability. From the perspective of block size, it takes fifteen to twenty times more space for each transaction than Beam, and five times more space than Bitcoin. So, if Monero had the same transaction volume as Bitcoin, it would have to store over 1TB of data. For individuals, this amount of data is huge. In addition, it took weeks to sync Monero's data, which was another problem. Under the same data volume as Bitcoin, Beam may be 50G, which is much smaller than Monroe.

Carbon chain value: But some people say that Monero is better at privacy.

Alex: That's a very interesting question, but I don't think that statement is true. First, 95 percent of Zcash transactions are not private. They are all public by default, when you use cash or send money through an account, you need to explicitly choose it to be private, and only 5 percent of transactions do.

Monero uses zk-snark technology, which is a great technology to hide everything. But it also has the big problem of having a centralized setup to begin with, where people have to get together and create a special set of keys. Even if the set of keys is compromised, the owner of the keys is still printing money without anyone seeing. Of course, we want them to be honest people. But this assumption is not once and for all, and we have to put a big question mark on it. Now, some Monero researchers are trying to prove that traders can follow transaction graphs.

People have not found this problem with MimbleWimble yet. So we think it's wise for privacy coins to adopt the Mimblewimble protocol, because you can't point out what's wrong with this set of protocols. We also believe that Beam is not worse than Monero, and may even be better, because Beam has no addresses. With Monero still having addresses, this kind of transaction is a bit messy by comparison.

Carbon chain value: As the CEO of a privacy coin team, how do you view the government and strike a balance between privacy and government regulation? After all, the government always wants to know and control what's going on with everyone.

Alex: Of course, the government wants to know everything about everyone. But we believe that humans have a right to privacy, and technology can guarantee our right to privacy.

We want to create a cash-like system in terms of privacy, but not without fighting the government too much. How to understand this matter? For example, if I have cash on hand, I can spend it privately, but generally not a lot. For example, if I go to Starbucks and McDonald's, my consumption will definitely not exceed 1,000 US dollars. But if I have a million dollars in cash, this becomes a problem. Usually people don't walk away with a million dollars in cash, do they? Unless they are criminals. On the other hand, if I were a merchant like Starbucks, maybe I would earn 10 million yuan in cash from consumers every day. But then I took it to the bank and all the receipts are there and I will also use this cash to pay taxes to the government through the bank.

So the pair is completely anonymous, but the business is compliant. This is exactly what we want to create. We tell the government, look, this is private money. Business people can complain, but it can also be used by the government.

And from the perspective of the government, as a regulator, you can say that private currencies are illegal, prohibited, and bad. But first of all, this policy is very difficult to enforce, right? Even though regulations are being set about it, if you're going to enforce it, you're going to need to check all of everybody's phones to see if they have cryptocurrency in them. But it's expensive, hard, and not worth it. In many countries, people wouldn't agree with that either, right?

So what we propose is an encrypted currency that can protect people's privacy, but can meet the requirements. We hope that over time regulators will start to accept this. After all, the technology is here. You can fight it, or embrace it and make it compliant.

In the Bitcoin world, everything is out there, and you don't need to be too smart to keep track of a lot. And in Beam's network, I'm not even sure it's possible to track transactions. I mean, you can try; you know, those people are smart people, they're going to try to do something. But from what we know right now, there is no way to remove this anonymity on Mimblewimble.

lightning network

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lightning network

Carbon chain value: The last question is about lightning. I heard that beam is planning to launch the lightning network in the near future. There are many different opinions about this technology. Some people think that if we use the Lightning Network, we will face a very centralized situation. What do you think of this?

Alex: We actually had a lot of internal discussions about this. You know, we did some research and we understand the Lightning Network. This technology has extraordinary potential, but also faces enormous challenges. Based on this, we will continue to do some work and keep a close eye on the market and technology trends.

Frankly speaking, if Lightning is fully decentralized, it will be very difficult to operate. This is like a group of small people looking for the right path in the sea, looking for the precious fluidity, but they have no way of knowing whether the path they choose has such sufficient fluidity. As a result, it would be difficult, if not impossible, for the Lightning Network to work.