July 23, 2023 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
23:08
| 
| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| I think we've stumbled across a real hidden gem in the privacy crypto space. | |
| It's called Beam, and it uses the Mimblewimble blockchain. | |
| B-E-A-M is spelled just like it sounds. | |
| And if you want to check out the website, it's beam.mw, which stands for Mimblewimble, which I'll explain here in a second. | |
| And it's a funny story how we found Beam. | |
| But by the way, on our new show, Decentralize.tv, Todd Pitner and I have interviewed Alexander from BEAM, and that interview is going to be running in just a few days, so you'll learn a lot more about it then. | |
| It's about an hour and 45 minute episode, though, so pretty lengthy, but I'm going to give you the short version here. | |
| So first of all, there aren't very many projects that use Mimblewimble as a blockchain. | |
| And Mimblewimble has some unique advantages, which is that it doesn't store wallet IDs in any kind of transaction records on the blockchain. | |
| So there are many different approaches to privacy. | |
| And by the way, you know I consider privacy to be absolutely critical. | |
| For preserving assets, being censorship-proof, confiscation-proof. | |
| Just having control over your money, having custody, almost requires privacy by definition. | |
| And sadly, Bitcoin is not private at all. | |
| I mean, Bitcoin is very important. | |
| It's got a valuable role to play in the world. | |
| It is an honest ledger. | |
| And I think it might be the world-reserved digital currency at some point. | |
| But Bitcoin's not private, right? | |
| All the transaction details are right on the blockchain. | |
| Here's your sending wallet ID. Here's your receiving wallet ID. Here's your transaction amount. | |
| And through that information, anybody can scan the chain and determine what's your wallet balance and what you've spent, what you bought, what your expenditures have been through Bitcoin and so on. | |
| So it's not private. | |
| So I've been focused on privacy coins a lot. | |
| And Mimblewimble is one of the most innovative approaches to privacy in terms of blockchains. | |
| Now there are other approaches. | |
| For example, the Vero coin has really revolutionized something called Lolantis. | |
| And Lelantis is a zero-knowledge proof type of algorithm. | |
| It's a mathematical approach to having information on the blockchain, but making it so that no one except the wallet owner knows the details of it. | |
| So if you're the wallet owner, you can scan the blockchain and you can determine, hey, these are my transactions, these are my balances, these are my coins, basically. | |
| I'm simplifying it, but that's essentially what it is. | |
| Whereas somebody else looking at the blockchain, all they see is a bunch of encrypted characters and garbage. | |
| They can't tell who or what happened or how much money, anything. | |
| And by the way, Monero uses something called ring signatures, which also obfuscates the wallet ID of the sending wallet and the receiving wallet. | |
| And then they use other methods to obfuscate the amounts that have been sent and so on. | |
| And all these projects have different approaches. | |
| But Mimblewimble is, I think, one of the newest, well, yeah, clearly it's one of the most recent approaches to blockchains, and it does not store wallet IDs on the chain at all. | |
| So it just uses some really elegant math. | |
| And so I was introduced to Mimblewimble first through a project called Epic Cache. | |
| And Epic Cache, that's how I met Todd Pitner, because Todd Pitner has had videos for years, I think two or three years, talking about Epic Cache and advocating for that project, which is based on Mimble Wimble. | |
| And Epic Cache, by the way, is a fork of an earlier project called Grin, G-R-I-N. And as far as I know, Grin was the first project to really implement the Mimblewimble blockchain and try to make a go of it in the coin marketplace. | |
| There was another one called Mimblewimblechain or something. | |
| I forgot the name of it. | |
| It seems like maybe it was only a pilot project, and I don't think it's been doing anything for years, so I don't know what happened to that. | |
| But Grin was around for a while. | |
| Grin is still traded on some decentralized exchanges, by the way. | |
| Some people keep Grin running. | |
| Anyway, Epic Cash was a fork of Grin. | |
| And then Epic Cash was kind of commercialized and kind of had fancier graphics and things like that. | |
| Epic Cash still suffered from the major drawback of Mimblewimble blockchains, a drawback that Beam has overcome in a very creative way. | |
| So the drawback is that in Mimblewimble, because wallet IDs are not stored on the blockchain, it means that when one wallet sends a transaction to another wallet, that both of those wallets have to be online. | |
| In other words, they have to be connected to the internet. | |
| They have to be ready to receive transaction information because there's a handshake between these wallets. | |
| And Todd describes it, he's my co-host on the show, he describes it as a ping pong ping. | |
| And by ping-pong-ping, he means that there's, for example, the sending wallet issues a message to the receiving wallet to say, hey, are you ready to receive? | |
| And then the receiving wallet says, yes, I'm ready to receive. | |
| Go ahead and send. | |
| I mean, again, this is a simplification. | |
| It's not exactly like this. | |
| But it's a back and forth. | |
| It's a handshake. | |
| And the problem with this, and this is a very big issue that involves anything using MimbleWimble. | |
| And I've heard developers talk about this, talking about how this is a very serious impediment to widespread adoption of Mimblewimble. | |
| The problem is that if you're trying to send money to somebody, what if they're not online? | |
| What if their wallet's not online? | |
| What if they don't have their wallet open on their phone? | |
| Or maybe they just don't have internet access at that moment or their phone's turned off or the wallet app isn't running or whatever, which is actually most of the time. | |
| It means that that transaction is going to seize up. | |
| It won't make it through. | |
| And then eventually the sender has to cancel the transaction after trying it for some long period of time. | |
| And it's just not going to work. | |
| And the other problem is that in the time that the sender is sending that transaction, Because of the way unspent outputs work on blockchains, and this is almost universal, you could have an unspent transaction amount of, let's say, $1,000, and you're trying to send somebody $100. | |
| Well, it's going to lock up the full $1,000 until that person receives their $100, and you get back the change of the $900. | |
| Again, this is an oversimplification, but that's essentially how UTXOs work or unspent transactions. | |
| Well, in the Mimbo-Wimbo blockchain, if you're trying to send to somebody and their wallet's not online, then your unspent transaction can be seized up. | |
| And effectively, if that transaction is never canceled, then that entire UTXO can be I don't want to use the word lost because it's not really lost. | |
| It's just never spendable again because it never got processed. | |
| You never got the change back. | |
| And I actually had a situation where I was trying to send and that lockup happened. | |
| And then that original wallet was... | |
| Lost or broken, no longer functional, and so I was not able to cancel that transaction. | |
| And even if you restore a wallet using a seed phrase, you don't have access to the transaction logs of the previous wallet. | |
| And so that's how money can actually be lost on Mimblewimble blockchains, which I found out. | |
| And again, technically it's not lost-lost, it's just never usable, which is kind of the same thing. | |
| You just can't use it. | |
| So it's gone. | |
| Whatever that UTXO was. | |
| Alright, now, so enter Beam, which has done something really interesting. | |
| Oh, there's something else. | |
| There's a challenge with Mimblewimble blockchains that Epic Cash is dealing with, which is that Epic Cash uses what are called Epic Boxes. | |
| In order to try to transmit the transaction to the receiving wallet and try to make that handshake happen. | |
| And that Epic Box kind of functions like an email server, but it's a mimble-wimble handshake server, you could say. | |
| And most of the people using Epic Cash are using all the same two or three Epic Boxes. | |
| Which means that the Epic Cash transactions are very centralized. | |
| It's not as decentralized as any of us would like. | |
| It's not actually just peer-to-peer talking to each other most of the time. | |
| It's going through the Epic Box servers. | |
| And so this presents a potential vulnerability. | |
| Now, I know that the Epic cache engineers are talking about this issue and thinking about different innovative approaches to maybe replace the Epic box servers with something else. | |
| But what Beam has done, which has really impressed me, is that Beam has a secure bulletin board messaging system as a layer that's handled by the Beam nodes that works across all of the Beam wallets, and it's native to the Beam ecosystem. | |
| It doesn't require centralized servers. | |
| Instead, it's a decentralized peer-to-peer secure broadcasting system That basically allows one wallet through the nodes to ping another wallet to say, hey, are you there? | |
| We want to do a handshake. | |
| We want to do an exchange here. | |
| And that other wallet can respond and say, yeah, I'm here. | |
| And then that exchange takes place very, very rapidly. | |
| In fact, I've been testing Beam transactions and very often they take place, at least the initial transaction, not counting the confirmations, but the initial transaction happens in two seconds. | |
| I've even seen it almost instantaneous, like one second, it's done. | |
| So this system really works and it doesn't require centralized box servers in order to function. | |
| But because Beam is based on Mimblewimble, it still does require the wallets to be online. | |
| But this secure broadcast system or bulletin board system We'll queue messages for up to 12 hours, waiting for the other wallet on the other end to get online within 12 hours, and then that will begin the handshake with the original sending wallet. | |
| So you actually have a 12-hour window in which both of these wallets need to be online in order for that transaction to take place. | |
| Alright, so Beam, from a technical standpoint, in my analysis, has solved this in a very elegant way that I think is much better, technically, than what Epic has done, because Epic's solution is very centralized. | |
| And we want to be decentralized. | |
| We want to be censorship proof. | |
| So we want to be as peer-to-peer as possible. | |
| Alright, but in either case, the Beam approach is still based on MembleWimble. | |
| Which means that at some point the wallets still have to be online. | |
| And what we found out with implementing Epic Cash as part of a tipping system on brighteon.com is that very often the tips don't go through. | |
| Because the content creator that is receiving tips in Epic Cash, the content creator's wallet has to be online in a timely manner. | |
| In order for that tip to make it through. | |
| So a lot of end users are sending tips of, and when I say tips, I mean like, you know, little epic cash amounts of cryptos, sending out the tips, and the tips are not being received. | |
| Again, because the wallet's not online. | |
| And then they're ending up having to cancel all the sends, and then the content creator doesn't receive the tips. | |
| So it turns out that the Mimblewimble system of the live handshaking is really a bad solution for online tipping. | |
| Because we've also implemented Monero. | |
| Now, Monero is an excellent solution for online tipping because Monero doesn't require the receiving wallet to be online. | |
| So in Monero, just like in Bitcoin or Litecoin or frankly most coins, you can send an amount which actually posts it to the blockchain. | |
| But the receiving wallet, frankly, never has to be online. | |
| Of course, if they ever want to claim the coins, they need to get online and then scan the blockchain and then assert ownership over those coins or technically unspent transactions. | |
| But in projects like Monero or Bitcoin, there's no need whatsoever for the receiving wallet to be online. | |
| And that makes Monero, as a privacy coin, a really good solution for online tipping. | |
| Well, so I asked the Beam people about this. | |
| And it turns out that they already have a solution that's built into the Beam ecosystem and the Beam wallets that's called an offline address. | |
| So an offline address is a different address inside Beam. | |
| You can find it in your Beam wallet, by the way. | |
| I think you just go into settings, I think, and then one of the options there shows you your offline address. | |
| And in Beam, an offline address works exactly like an offline transaction in, let's say, Firo, or very similar to the way Monero works. | |
| So an offline transaction allows you to send or receive, obviously, even if the wallets aren't handshaking with each other. | |
| And so what I learned about Beam Is that Beam has both the online transaction capability using Mimblewimble, which has, I think, the most elegant protocol of a blockchain that does not encode any kind of wallet IDs of any kind. | |
| It's a very slimmed-down blockchain, which has all kinds of other advantages in terms of portability and storage space efficiency and things like that. | |
| But then that also in Beam, if you want to have an offline transaction, that can be done too. | |
| And by offline, it doesn't mean that you're not connected to the internet. | |
| It just means that the receiving wallet is not itself open and talking at that moment. | |
| That's what's meant by an offline transaction. | |
| So in other words, Beam can function kind of like Firo. | |
| Beam can function kind of like Monero and Beam can function kind of like Epic Cache, but with a more decentralized secure bulletin board system so that you don't have to funnel transactions through centralized box servers. | |
| So Beam kind of takes the best of each of these projects. | |
| In fact, Beam borrowed the Lelantis algorithms from FIRO. And I've also interviewed Ruben from FIRO. In fact, Todd and I both conducted that interview, and that interview is going to run very soon. | |
| And it's a really fascinating interview because we learn about Lelantis and the next big innovation in FIRO. FIRO is spelled F-I-R-O, by the way, if you're wondering. | |
| But the next big innovation is called Lelantis Spark, which is going to be a major overhaul, a major improvement, and kind of a quantum leap in privacy and technology. | |
| You'll hear about that in the FIRO interview coming up. | |
| But Beam borrows from Firo to use the Lelantis offline addressing, and then also Beam borrows from the original Mimblewimble white paper in order to implement the Mimblewimble blockchain for maximum privacy when wallets are live and talking to each other. | |
| Now Beam did not fork Grin, and Beam is not a fork of Epic Cash. | |
| So they wrote the code themselves, I think in C++, is what Alexander said in the interview. | |
| They implemented the white paper and wrote their own code and they started that, I don't know, four and a half years ago or something like that, and then ended up with this kind of superset of both Epic Cache and Firo. | |
| So Beam does what Epic Cache does, but also adds kind of what Firo does in a more decentralized fashion. | |
| So that's what I find fascinating about Beam. | |
| And you know what? | |
| What actually made me aware of Beam was the fact that I think it was the Binance exchange. | |
| Yeah, it was Binance that delisted Beam. | |
| In fact, Binance delisted a whole set of privacy coins all at the same day. | |
| They issued a press release and they said, we're delisting, you know, this and that and this other thing and all these things. | |
| And for me, that was a gold mine because I was, I looked at the press release and I said, this is amazing. | |
| I want to talk to all these projects. | |
| And so I took that list of coins that Binance banned because they said they're privacy coins, which of course got me all drooling and interesting, like privacy coins, you know, this is awesome. | |
| Let's talk about privacy coins. | |
| And so I gave that list to my producers and I said, I want you to contact every project that was banned by Binance. | |
| And we want to talk to them and have them on. | |
| And so we've even done an interview with a project called Dash. | |
| Which actually isn't even a privacy coin, but Binance thought it was a privacy coin. | |
| So I think they banned Dash at first, and maybe they brought it back. | |
| I don't recall the current status. | |
| But it was hilarious to me that Binance thought Dash was a privacy coin. | |
| It isn't. | |
| It's got really no privacy features at all. | |
| But anyway, we interviewed Dash, and we've interviewed Furo, and we've interviewed Beam, like I said, and some other projects coming up as well. | |
| It's fascinating to me. | |
| What I'm learning overall is that just because you have really great technology as a coin, it doesn't mean that people even know about it. | |
| It doesn't mean the coin is popular. | |
| And sometimes the current price of a coin It doesn't reflect the technology at all. | |
| It just reflects the popularity. | |
| It's kind of just, I don't know, it's like a popularity contest in many cases, what the current price is. | |
| But it also shows the fluidity that prices can radically move up or down depending on how people feel about projects. | |
| Just a mood shift can have major implications for the valuations of different projects. | |
| And that can be both on the positive and negative side. | |
| So there is an element of just, frankly, just popularity in this. | |
| And what I'm finding is that, in many cases, the popularity overrides the importance of the tech because a lot of users, they hop onto coins just because they're popular, even when those users don't understand the technology. | |
| And so they really don't have any basis from which to assess the technology to say, hey, is this a better privacy approach? | |
| You know, what are the vulnerabilities? | |
| Is this centralized or decentralized? | |
| You know, things like that. | |
| So part of what I want to do with the new show that we have with Todd Pitner, which is called Decentralize.tv, So in this show, we hope to answer a lot of questions and interview a lot of people and learn a lot about these projects and try to express what we think are the pros and cons of these projects, | |
| the strengths or vulnerabilities of them, and also to bring you projects that I consider to be maybe hidden gems, which is, in this case, BEAM. I think Beam, for the tech that it has it is extremely let's say not well known It frankly deserves to be better known. | |
| Now, just to be clear, as a disclaimer, of course I hold some amount of Beam and Epic and Firo and Bitcoin and Monero. | |
| Every coin that I mention, I hold some amount of those coins because I'm testing them. | |
| I'm using them. | |
| I'm using the wallets, I'm testing transactions, sometimes rebuilding wallets. | |
| I even did mining with Epic just to see how complicated that was. | |
| It's pretty complicated, but it's doable. | |
| But I haven't done any mining of anything since then, and I just did that as a proof of concept just to see how it worked. | |
| But you can assume I do hold various amounts of coins in various projects, but What I'm interested in is finding high-utility projects that we can use for e-commerce, for tipping systems, for international transactions, for gifting, and for stores of value. | |
| And that's the focus of the show. | |
| So check it out at decentralized.tv. | |
| We've got many episodes already posted there and many more coming. | |
| Thanks for listening. | |
| I'm Mike Adams here of brighteon.com and naturalnews.com. | |
| A global reset is coming. | |
| And that's why I've recorded a new nine-hour audiobook. | |
| It's called The Global Reset Survival Guide. | |
| You can download it for free by subscribing to the naturalnews.com email newsletter, which is also free. | |
| I'll describe how the monetary system fails. | |
| I also cover emergency medicine and first aid and what to buy to help you avoid infections. | |
| So download this guide. | |
| It's free. |
Export Selection