Many people may be curious about Beam mining calculator. How to mine beam? This article will show you the answer.
1. What is Beam?
Beam is a privacy coin that aims to explore confidential DeFi. It utilizes the Mimblewimble protocolwhich conceals the values and metadata of transactions, while reducing blockchain bloating and improving scalability. With the latest implementation of LelantusMWit aims to bring privacy and anonymity in all fronts.
Beam's mission is to let users have complete control over their money. The team is building a new blockchain to provide confidential, decentralized and usable store of value and medium of exchange, as well as a strong self-governed community to further develop and support it.
2. Blockchain and network data
Beam is based on MimbleWimble, a protocol that allows full confidentiality of blockchain transactions without compromising scalability. Similar to Bitcoin, the MimbleWimble blockchain is based on the Unspent Transaction Ourput ("UTXO") model. However, in MimbleWimble there are no addresses, and UTXO values are encrypted by the "blinding factors". Blinding factors are private keys which are only known to the UTXO owner. It is not possible for an observer to deduce any information on ownership or value of a Beam UTXO.
To create a transaction, the sender and the receiver wallets need to first establish communication. Once the communication is established, the sender provides the transaction inputs, and both sender and receiver create their respective outputs with range proofs attesting that the values are non-negative. Both parties sign the transaction and then it is sent out to the nodes.
3. Transaction schematics
Secure Bulletin Board System (SBBS)
Beam is built on the Mimblewimble protocol, whuch that achieves confidentiality while significantly improving blockchain scalability. However, in Mimblewimble there are no addresses, and transactions need to be built interactively by the participating parties. That poses a challenge: if Alice wants to send money to Bob, both of their wallets have to connect and perform necessary actions. Creating a direct socket connection every time is impractical while most users depend on Network Address Translations (NATs). Beam’s Secure Bulletin Board (SBBS)system solves this problem and makes the user experience similar to that of Bitcoin and other existing cryptocurrencies.
Dandelion schematics
The nodes verify that the sum of inputs and outputs is exactly zero and that the range proofs and signatures are correct. The inputs are then removed from the current UTXO set, and the outputs are saved.
To improve scalability, the MimbleWimble protocol utilizes the Transaction Cut-Through mechanism. For Beam, the intermediate states of the blockchain are not saved. The blockchain only holds the current state of the UTXO set, and thus does not have to grow linearly with the number of transactions.
As an additional privacy mechanism, Beam implements Dandelion. With Dandelion, transactions are not broadcasted to all nodes immediately. Instead, each transaction is passed through several nodes before being broadcasted to the whole network. At each step of the stem phase, the transaction is merged with other transactions arriving at the same nodes, with the addition of special decoy outputs for better obfuscation.
Lelantus-MW
With the Breaking Linkability feature at heart of Lelantus-MW, it is designed to provide maximum privacy when transacting Beam. An extra layer of protection is added to Beam’s already default privacy and allows users to unlink any potential connections between their transactions, further protecting users' privacy against attackers.
Breaking Linkability is already active on the Beam CLI wallet and in the future ill be introduced to the GUI wallets Lelantus-MW, which brings an anonymity set of 64,000.
Offline transactions
Offline transactions are not a given on any Mimblewimble implementation as by nature this protocol is interactive. Offline transactions are enabled through the Lelantus MW protocol implemented on Beam on the 5.1 wallet version.
Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus with ASIC resistance
For consensus, Beam uses Beam Hash, a Proof-of-Work algorithm based on Equihash.
When Beam launched on Jan 3, 2019, it was announced that Beam will perform two hard forks. The rationale was to signal to ASIC developers that there is no point to start developing ASICs until the second hard fork is out. Beam timed the first fork roughly 6 months from launch, and the second one in mid 2020. The 10-month timeframe is chosen considering how long it usually takes to develop a new ASIC chip.
BeamHash III is an improvement to the Beam mining network and is it better for GPU mining and GPU miners, as memory-consuming operations in the design of BeamHash III allow better use of the fuller capabilities of a GPU card. The stronger algorithm binding of the new scheme utilized in BeamHash III aims to make "unknown optimisations" potentially used for secret mining more unlikely.
Closing thoughts
Beam is a scalable, private cryptocurrency based on both the MimbleWimble and LelantusMW protocols that aims to explore the world of confidential Decentralized Finance (DeFi). The project has raised ~$5.2 MM via private token sales.
The Beam blockchain utilizes Proof-of-Work (POW)to reach network consensus. Using the MimbleWimble protocol, Beam is able to enhance privacy and fungibility, while reducing blockchain bloating and improving scalability. Addresses are not stored in the blockchain and transactions are private by default. To maximize privacy to the network, Beam utilizes LelantusMW, offering an anonymity set of up to 64 kilobytes.
Hope this article can provide you with a better understanding about Beam mining calculator: How to mine beam.
