ZKPodcast: MimbleWimble pt 2: Beam Protocol

Transcript

welcome to zero knowledge a podcast where we explore the latest in blockchain technology and the decentralized web the show is hosted by me Anna and me Fredrik in this week's episode I sit down with the guys from beam to dive deeper into the member wendel protocol to discuss the beam implementation and look at how this protocol might be used in the future [Music] before we start we want to say thank you to this week's sponsor streamer

streamers just launched their global pubsub network for machine data and so if you are a web 3 systems architect looking for a trust less real-time messaging solution this will be something for you unlike a cloud-based data pipeline the streamer network runs peer-to-peer in a system that offers a smart balance between high privacy and low latency as well as MQTT support they are currently looking for individuals and projects to join the network and jump in on this important and exciting research if you want to start using it today just visit streamer dot Network there you can find additional material about what drove their design choices as well as metrics and measurements about their network for more on the streamer offering have a listen to an episode we

did last year with one of streamers co-founders Henry so thanks again streamer for supporting this podcast and now here's our interview with the guys from beam so today I'm sitting with Alex and Alexander from beam welcome to the show guys thank you pleasure to be here thanks this is not the first time that we have two Alexes on on our show I think with matter labs we had Alex and Alex as well Alexander do you want to just say what you do at beam sure so I'm the CEO of beam my job is mostly talking and trying to make sure that I'm not getting too much in the way of people doing the

actual work here very good and Alex I am the CTO of beam and my job is actually making sure that the people that are actually doing things are doing that and interrupted the general kind of alright so this is the second episode that we're doing where we did kind of into the topic of nimble Wimble we've done an episode with Daniel from grin and we talked about the way that grin implemented minimal Wimble but I think it's really cool that we get a chance to speak to you guys who are implementing it independently and yet there's a lot of connection between these two groups and kind of back and forth and sharing

of ideas and stuff like that so I'd like to explore that in today's episode but before we start in on beam I think even though we've covered roughly what member Wimble is in that episode I want to kind of go over some of it again with you guys but actually the first question I have is sort of like what what got you excited about member wendel specifically and maybe when did you find out about it sure we found out about member Wimble more or less like about half a year a year after it was you know become became like popular and used maybe some of the team learned about it on day one and I think what's exciting about it is that it

solves privacy right from the get-go and it gives privacy without the scalability trade-offs that all other protocols that you know offer privacy and blockchain have are you thinking like okay yes yes because those protocols and I'm talking very much in layman's terms but they tube the basic architecture of Bitcoin and added stuff on to it to hide the information so what's beautiful about member limbo is that it's built in such a way that there is I could almost say nothing to hide because there's no information on the blockchain it sells it's it's built in a different way so there are trade-offs to achieve that the

protocol has to have some interactivity between the two wallets in order to create a transaction but the weights built is actually he presents a new look on how the blockchain can work and it really sold for both privacy and scalability in essay 1 and it's very elegant it uses standard cryptography that is really well understood so there is much less chance there to be like a terrible had a strong big bug then in something that's very new what about yourself yes so the min Google paper was published in June I think or July 2016 and it immediately attracted a lot of attention because as Alexander mentioned

it provided a very elegant and simple solution to this very non-trivial problem of combining confidentiality on blockchain with scalability and the idea is behind the protocol was basically to structure the UTX own model in a way that would allow for this cut off feature we would probably discuss again several times and thus eliminate the need to store every single transaction every single checks on chain and basically it means that the blockchain now scales as a function of the uth sauce and not as function of transactions which is the major problem that does not allow the same store built in Bitcoin for example because in Bitcoin we have to store all the

transactions on chain which makes the blockchain eventually much larger so right from the start it got attention from both and to the essence of the privacy field and well-known cryptographers and Andrew Palestra was one of the first who has researched the protocol and published a separate paper about it basically doing different research and if eventually proving that it could be a good model to do to build and almost immediately like I think few months after the initial publication in November 2016 Green started working on the their implementation of the protocol so it was when we got to start when we started working on it in March 2018 it

was an already in existing bus there was a lot of interest from both technical and in crypto privacy interests communities and it was I think at that time one of the more like promising and developments in this field and so we were interested for quite a while before we started the actual implementation but at some point we realized that we do want to make our own own implementation with protocols so basically we have assembled the team in in March 2018 and started working on it and nine or ten months later we launched our maintenance which was January 3rd this year 2018 which was the 10th anniversary of the Bitcoin the first Bitcoin block yeah it was kind of an

interesting date yeah very symbolic so we did it very quickly by assembling professional team of developers most of whom I knew personally and worked before previously on different projects many of them are my personal friends so I basically went to the top of top of the line of all the people that I knew from all my previous years of developing different kinds of software and that's what they allowed us to launch it fairly quickly were you working in blockchain technologies before the services the first no I was not and actually none of our team had any previous experience with any blockchain projects even more so the first cryptocurrency I have ever

actually owned was Ben so I didn't even have a Bitcoin before that what did you have to do differently like how do you have to think differently when you're working in this space well it's a completely new it was completely new technological field for us so we had to do a lot of learning very quickly luckily our developers are very talented and most of them have either mathematical or physical physics background so they could understand both the math behind this and and also the implementation details of course when dealing with cryptography there are a lot of nuances that you do not have with the regular software of course in blockchain it's a completely different

animal in terms of how all this ecosystem is being deployed and updated and how you actually test it so we had to overcome a lot of challenges and learn very quickly how to deal with this aspects of that were completely new to us and I think we managed to do this rather well we did everything by ourselves so we didn't it was not a fork it was not a clone outside of the most basic libraries we didn't take one line of code from any other project so we build everything from scratch and it gave us a lot of experience and understanding of the really deep inner workings of the essential components such as not logic and world logic so it

allowed us to control a lot of aspects of this implementation and I think the result is very good we have right now like very stable and well-functioning software we had the hard fork recently which also went very well so I think it was mostly a success story in terms of the implementation yeah and what about you Alexander have you worked in blockchain so I haven't working for Shane either so it's I I got interested in blockchain several years ago and I you know did play with Bitcoin and theorem and stuff like this but not in a very heavy way and to me it's also the first project in blockchain so I think what we have on the team is like a healthy combination because some members

of the team where some of our advisers are very like old very much old timers and know the space very well on the other hand part of the team is relatively new in blockchain well now we're also kind of Alzheimer's I'll say myself we could say because the year is a lot of time but there's a healthy combination of people with experience in the space and people with experience elsewhere so answering clear question now it I didn't have much we know work experience but there was something about this that made you go you know what now I'm gonna jump in Yeah right because that there was the potential of the field because this dream of replacing the monetary system it's a huge dream and right now our oil industry is tiny

compared to the financial system in general and thus the potential just mind-blowing I don't think there is right now there is any like technology feel that has such a potential to grow like hundreds of times so you have a live network what was launching that like there was that was stressful and funny and I remember the day January the 3rd we were sitting in our office like in another tower right here in Tel Aviv I mean myself and other guys were spread out the world where they are they were

and I remember it took us somebody took like about took us about half an hour to launch because the website got so much load that you know it took us time to publish the binaries and there was one more thing before we launched we were kind of we had to set the network difficulty right because you have to set the difficulty to some figure so that it kind of makes sense and we were kind of debating internally like okay how many GPUs are going to - maybe 3,000 maybe 4,000 so we said it initially at roughly at around 10,000 GPUs I think and we thought well there's no way and it was like a hundred thousand Wow when we launched so he was like it was a surprise because you actually this launched before grin launched yes this

was the first member level project to launch yes grin followed up on January the 15th in two weeks Wow and so you got that and that was like right during the moment that there was like a lot of eyes on this project yeah was did anything break not immediately no not immediately but we did have two issues in that January one was some poll in the wallet that we found and patched immediately and another one was a pretty stressful event event it was a blockchain stop the blockchain to stop there was a certain condition of to you th souls that were

sent from to wallets with the same seed that somehow created the stop but and and that was like the second event and we were already kind of better to it and we were communicating like every half-hour so we fix it in like three or three to four hours okay but it was still it was a stressful event event since then I don't think we had any issues and I hope we won't although you know it's software so you never know hmm so I kind of want to ask you a few more questions about the tech taking from what you just described before you mentioned something called a cut-through function I actually don't know what a cut-through function is okay so the whole idea behind me marimba is to get

rid of the Bitcoin script which is the way the transactions are actually created in Bitcoin in Bitcoin sort of condition you should give this to TXO to whoever knows the secret of specific address so min bow-window structures you teach so differently by using this cryptographic primitive called the Patterson commitment it basically allows you to take several UT x sauce and combine them together so basically in any transaction like in Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrencies you have inputs and outputs the coins you spend and the new coins that you create the difference is that when you combine a lot of inputs and a lot of outputs together so basically merge several transactions

you can eliminate all the intermediate utx all the ones that you spend already are no longer relevant let me give an example let's say I send you a transaction with some u TX o and then you send it to somebody else the semi T so exactly so if we just add together all these factors you see that in turn in the intermediary falls out because it's like plus the input or minus the output and this allows you to basically ignore all the intermediate information and the only thing you're interested in is where this u TXO came from originally and they all come from the blocks that mined them so called coinbase reward and then you are interested in who is the owner of this specificity so on this specific moment and this is the only

information that you actually need to store on the blockchain and if you take this logic and you expand it to the entire blockchain so basically all you get is these headers of the blocks which prove two things first of all that the exact amount of fatigue souls created for each block the mining reward and the tree that it's called the Merkel tree this data structure that holds all the you take souls that are currently unspent and this is the owner information that you as a new node in the system need to download to start working and verifying it so the cut through is actually this process of compacting this blockchain and removing all this intermediate you take souls that are no longer relevant if that is that something that's just in standard Bitcoin or is this something that's

really novel to involve this is exactly the novelty of my movable this is exactly the elegant trick that it has this trade off of having to give up on Bitcoin scrip be conscripted a allows for a lot of different interesting operations that you can do on the blockchain and you kinda have to give it up in order to get this elegant structure that you can then compress however there are different ways to achieve the same concepts and ideas that are currently implemented in Bitcoin script today and in a serum smart contest for example it's called scripted scripts it's kind of an extension on this entire concept but it's probably for another question so maybe to say the same in more layman's terms so the the

blockchain only holds the currently existing points utx owes and and the ownership structure right so it just lists whatever coins are in existence right now and it also lists all the coins that were ever minted and it proves that the transition from the original minted coins to the current state was correct and the thing that proves is proves that is actually the kernels so for each transaction there is a small thing that remains on the blockchain and it's the transaction kernel it's a very small data structure that actually contains it it is signed by both parties and it contains a proof

that the amount of inputs in that particular transaction equal the amount of output so no new money was published and also it has a proof well actually in the UT exo's have a prove that their values are positive so so the only thing that remain per transaction is a kernel hmm and it's very small it's about a hundred 112 bytes so that's why the blockchain size while it does grow a little bit with the number of transactions but the most growth is with the number of the UT excels which does not even have to grow because if I take if I want to pay you a hundred beam and I have a hundred coins of one beam then actually the number of UT exo's in the system will become

smaller after I do the strings actually does even have to grow now I have a I have a question like beam is one implementation of member Wimble and grin is a different one do you use the same like proof-of-work function no yeah we both use we both use proof of work as consensus mechanisms but mechanism but the algorithms are different I see which what what do you use we're using something we call beam hash which is actually a variant of eques hash so we had beam hash one before the fork and now we have beam hash too so it is basically modified ackley hash

well Green is using something that they developed on their own it was available on trompe very interesting technology called kuku cycle with several variants again I guess the green guys can be Kendra later that much much better so so they're not compatible those are different algorithms and ours is I mean it's not simpler but it doesn't have that much innovation so we took the existing Apple hash modified it a little bit and make it work for us while grin developed their own very elaborate system with two or even more different algorithm that algorithms that actually the percentage of blocks mined with h1 is changing so it's it's much more

innovation there ok I kind of want to like I think one of the things because we just recently had grin on I'd love to hear if there's anything any other sort of pieces of the build that are very like significantly different so I think there are a lot of things that are different so the monetary policy is different right this is something that is very very much observable and relevant for for everyone right so grin is inflationary they will be minting 60 grin per minute or 1 grin per second forever while beam follows in an emission curve very similar to Bitcoin mm-hmm so it means like later miners will get less yes early miners there is

a benefit to be so the first year is a hundred coins per block and the second to fifth year is 50 coins per block and then having every four years until year 133 so that's one difference another difference is the funding mechanism so we use something that's called farmer's reward oh you do have founders yeah we do have founders reward enstein very much so so in the first five years of operation 20% of all the mined coins go to the Treasury yeah and this Treasury is distributed between the venture investors who put in the money that actually lets us develop and operate between the core team and advisers and

large chunk is set a way for a non-profit foundation that we're now in the process of setting up and that I guess would have some sort of board that makes decisions yes yes the foundation it will start with the board and all the decisions will be made by the board but eventually we are already looking at ways to make it like decentralize like a dowel Wow it will take time so initially it will operate it will be operated by the board in a you know in a consensus method but still kind of central have you been like given that you also have a founders reward have you been following the sea cash founder reward conversation closely yes yes we have what I mean like it's

interesting because that that question of like how project funds itself my personally I find it more and more interesting and I catch myself asking that to understand better what the plan is going forward and I think in some cases the plan has been we will pay our early developers in token they will make a lot of money with that and that is a motivation that works to a level but then there's also a conversation of how do you continue with maintenance how do you continue development after especially after like those early contributors who maybe have made a lot of you know have have done very well for themselves they either no longer want to work or maybe they're not as into it or they're doing something else how do you then incentivize this new group of

people who are arriving because you can't necessarily promise the price will always go up forever so this is a this is a challenge this is a challenge but we are starting it to to address it early so the foundation will solicit and will pay for development done by third parties by the way in the beginning it a lot of it will still be done by the company yeah right because it takes time to build as community but the foundation will bring in more people and incentivize them with with payment with the goal of having you know after five six seven years having this global community that already continues itself right so the original contributors will

hopefully be still out there and still interested in in in in the well-being of the protocol but our goal is to make their contribution smaller our contribution smaller in you know percentage-wise with time also the the the the more we move forward there will be less need for very fast innovation right so it will be the the speed of development will be much more relaxed do you feel like was there any pushback for having a founders reward well especially in the beginning when we kind of published this whole idea and when it became public we got a lot of heat from you know all kinds of maximalists and

just people who are bored in this head you are scammers and you're it's not fair and you were stealing and you're but right now when we actually demonstrated that we're developing and delivering quality stuff that's working then a lot of people and we also doing it quickly in high quality and very usable then some I think more people understand that there's nothing wrong with you know people getting paid for their work and also getting some upside if their work is something really great as in my view that's like that's how the world works right any startup is building such a in that fashion right now the important thing is to be upfront

and to tell everything to everyone right not to hide anything which we never did in they're not going to do so I think right now there is much more acceptance of this model although of course grain model is totally different and it also has its advantages right they're not dependent on anyone at all they're not dependent on money so they can develop forever so it's I think both models have their good sides now but what what we can see with beam and grin very specifically that our model allows for much faster and feature and more feature-rich development and creating

software more software faster is that just because you have a bigger pool like you have a bigger pool of funding well I don't think it's it's it's about the size of the team and the time everybody spends yeah on on were you know we have a full-time team of about 24 people most of whom are developers so and that's their job right and they're part of the team part of the family but they're not working on anything else while most of the people who work on grin and other open source project you know find time for their passion now again the positive thing is that they're like creative super passionate about what they're doing because they're doing that as an extra most of them

our guys are also very passionate again this is their and for us as well it's like what we do get up and we work on this project and then we cool what about I want to pass it back to you Alex what what other technical differences that you that you could you say exist between beam and grin well quite a lot outside of the fact that we are both using limbo limbo as the underlying protocol I think that there are more differences than commonalities different programming language we are using C++ and green is using rust rust is kind of an evolution or C++ more modern and more popularly getting more popular every day yeah we talk about it

a lot on this podcast yeah Roderick is a fan there are a lot of pens and I completely understand why however when we started in our implementation we needed to find people fast and obviously there are still more experience to plus past developers out there so it was easier for us we have a lot of differences in terms of how we exactly we implemented this protocol how it works how the communication between the words work in order to create a transaction so for example we have created our sBBs system which is a secure bulletin board that allows you to exchange encrypted messages between the wallet and thus you make it very easy for two words to connect and create the transaction I think it's a great

addition to a usability which is one of the core aspects that we're really really focusing on because one of the problems that we see in this space is that a lot of technology is not really accessible to like non geek or non-technical people we want to improve on that as much as we can so which is why we have invested a lot of time and effort and product you know thinking about usability to make it as usable as possible so that's quite another difference when you say usability in this case though do you mean usability for devs or do you mean usability for end-users no I mean usability for end-users oh wow yeah like at the wallet level first of first and foremost at the wallet level yes we have developed wallets for all

existing platforms so our desktop wallets they run on Linux Mac and Windows and we also have two different mobile wallets for Android and iOS so it's very convenient to use beam from any device that you might have which is very important for us but also you know thinking about how the wallet looks like how easy it is to operate how we try to hide some of the technical details behind you know easy to use structures and features so it's quite a lot of work because UI and UX is always very tense so that's yet another difference we have also had some additional you know differences on the protocol level the way we use tender line which is the

transport protocol that sends transactions and between the notes in general in Bitcoin for example whenever a node receives a new transaction it just immediately broadcast it to all the peers that he knows oh yeah and this might allow for some very interesting timing attacks when you're monitoring large amount of the network you can try to figure out which was the node that originated the transaction so then the line is the concept proposed by a group of researchers led by Joe Lafont II and the idea is that you first send these transactions through a series of nodes and only then you fluff it it sounds like a mixer each message is not exactly a mixer in a regular sense but

what it allows to do is to obscure yeah and make the restructure the construction of the transaction graph much more difficult it's similar to tor in some way so the the transaction is not immediately broadcast but it goes through a series of nodes and only one of them just sends it out to the wild so it's very hard to trace the origin now in addition to that every node actually merges all the transactions that are coming to it to make it like look like one big transaction and if there is not enough transactions coming to it it just in our case this is also different from grynn we add what we call decoy outputs so as the transaction is traveling on this stem of the stand-down and

dandelion flower it gets bigger so it's it makes it hard to take the original address or the source IP address but also it kind of makes it much bigger with adding decoy outputs or other output so it becomes harder to trace kind of as you described a lot of these features all of it is towards more privacy do you see beam and remember one ball in general it's just being purely privacy driven or is there other benefits that come from this protocol I would say this protocol brings in privacy and scalability together I see ok so it's a very healthy combination of privacy and scalability although we're working to further improve both of them so we've been treat just recently

announced our work on a protocol called lil antis it's a very new protocol developed by cryptographer named Aram Giovanni on the coin yeah okay so we got fascinated with with this technology and we actually adapted it and published how it can be adapted to member Wimble and we're looking to implement it to further improve privacy and we're also looking for ways to improve the scalability as well so so so again member Wimble is both privacy and scalability and a beam we are trying to push the envelope you know even further I want to ask sort of one more question on on grin because and I know the reason

I think that there is a lot of I mean in this episode we've talked a lot about grin I think it's because at least from where I was sitting over in Berlin grin somehow was like more visible early on and so I wonder how do you still do you work a lot with grin do you work together did you work together early on like I'm just curious about what the relationship is between the two groups so I think we have established a very good healthy working relationship it's not that we are you know developing in parallel or working together in a specific project but we do have several groups and several discussion groups that are both part of our public part of

them are like and telegram we are we are sharing ideas and asking questions and it's been working very well at least for us and hopefully for them you know in some cases where there is some some issue with a protocol or something we need to discuss then it it's because arguably those are only the all the two best teams in the world that understand me I'm a Wimble yeah right so we share we share a lot of information and we share some future ideas and I think overall we've built a very good and healthy relationship with with grid so of course there is a certain competition because we are you know two points on this

protocol but it's not a zero-sum game and we think there is space for two maybe even more currencies but right now there are two major implementations and with we find it very beneficial you know the opportunity to talk to and the guys there most of them are brilliant developers so it's it's really a pleasure and it's very useful and it's good for all types of sites what would a fork even look like in something like member Wimble a fork you mean like a blockchain for yeah like a hard fork but like say say somebody or say somebody wanted to fork one of these projects so there are two those senses right so Wow like when you say fork you

can mean that somebody takes the source code and creates a new project right so this this has already happened there are I think about 10 different Forks most of them grins Forks but also a couple of beam Forks like there is a bit grin which is grin with captain mission there is Grimm which is a beam fork and and there are a bunch of others so and hopefully there will be more because again this is this tells us that you know there's something interesting in this protocol but none of them has reached you know the the stage that beam or grin are at you know they're not that significant yet so and then this can be done like anyone can do that it's all

open source obviously so it's not different from any other protocol and that's a Genesis fork so you start from scratch yes yes so you just server you take the code insert new project now if if we're talking about a hard fork that's something different that's when you release a new piece of software that breaks the consensus and then you want all the community to adopt this new software because if they don't then the network splits now both grinnin and beam have done that exactly this summer a hard fork yeah they did their own in July I think and we did ours in August in both cases it was the change of the mining algorithm

there was the most important and I guess some other stuff and so and it it went well because those both of those Forks were not contentious forks right they didn't hurt anyone but we know that in some cases in history you know some Forks if some people don't like it then then a tree split so we were lucky and you know everyone we know or we see converted to the new version what is the minor community like in beam well uh in my view miners are very professional people who calculate meticulously and just mine coins that make sense to mine although there is

someone sometimes sentiment towards a specific coin so we know that some of the miners are not just mining and selling immunity but also holding maybe you can correct them but I don't think our miners are different from other miners they might be different because a little bit because we're a GPU my novel coin right it's not a six so it's kind of probably different scale of companies so our our miners are a little bit smaller there is my other as much more pools and much more people who are mining at home through a pool so it's a little bit more democratic but in that respect it's probably similar to any GPU my noble coin got it

Sony I don't think we've ever done like a full episodes on miners it might be something worth doing some mining is an exciting topic which is very rich with a lot of details and nuances and these people are highly technical both in hardware and software and as Alexandre said it's all about calculating you know the profits and the margins and the capex and OPEX and all the other parameters of course the electricity cost and I know that some of our miners they are dedicated be miners but a very large part of them are mining Assyria more like different coins as well that are GPU mine a bow and switch whenever it's profitable so far beam has

been I think pretty profitable to to mine according to the mining sites that calculate all these you know rewards so yeah we have a very steady and rising hash rate during the last heart work in in August we have improved the mining algorithm that we're using and made it more efficient by about 25 to 30 percent so it means that you can mine more more blocks and have higher pass rate with the same equipment so it was also very good improvement do you also have the like are you worried about or do you want to encourage a sick use can can can there be a six for beam

yes so theoretically yes however we have from the beginning announced that we're going to do two scheduled hard works to avoid the Essex oh you want to avoid them in this case or yes so it basically two hard works it means that at least for a year and a half it would not be economically profitable to create an AC but after that the foundation will determine whether it goes you know and where this where this goes the current algorithm we are using a new hash it's very memory intensive it requires a lot of memory so it's not very simple and cheap to create an ASIC to to mind that but I think it mostly depends on the success of the coin because if beam

is hugely successful I think eventually it might become really profitable and for to create a dedicated I support but as I know currently there are no such efforts but it might change in the future yeah so the idea behind the two forks was to make it to get to signal Asics developers that it's not worth to even start working because it usually takes like about six months to develop an ASIC and if the the thing changed so after the second heart fork you know but then if it makes economic sense then developers will start working on that if there any sort of I don't even know if this is possible but could you have anything like lightning or any off chain connection with member windmill or is

that crazy I'm getting an eye-roll from you coincidentally during the last four we have introduced the relative time locks which is the mechanism that allows exactly that to create payment channels which are an essential building block for lighting networks so first of all you can create a channel between the two wallets lock some coins and then have instant transactions of chain and then as a next step you basically add routing which allows you to pay someone even if you don't have a direct channel to this person just by going through several

hopes of large enough funded channels so yes basically we have created a demo which was I think released today oh my gosh yeah actually today it's temporary teens we have aired the YouTube video that is demonstrating the use of the lightning networks kind of lightning Network payment channels between the wallets we call the laser beam knife it's very cool it's very interesting technology very complicated and we're very proud of it so the demo is currently only in command-line wallet but we're thinking about incorporating it into our product line of desktop and mobile wallets as well but the only the only kind of thing

with lightning specifically is like if you're doing that you kind of do lose the privacy like you're going or can you can you make lightning in this case yeah not at all like all the transactions are still completely private because when eventually they're settled on chain after you have like a series of back and forth between the two wallets it follows the same nimble window protocol and it basically just creates new users according to the settlement which is completely private oh I see okay in that case I mean so what it makes me think of though is like one of these protocols like bolt would you need to use bolt in that case so I'm not really deeply familiar with was bought but one of the key differences between beam and for

example Bitcoin in in this sense of adding lighting in our case it's not a second layer solution it's the first layer it's inside the node so you don't yeah so one the reasons a lot of things work is they doing bitcoins because it tried to build on top of the existing infrastructure while we can still change the infrastructure and make it work from from inside so it has a lot of benefits okay this way you don't have to go through a large series of compromises then but then the other question is is there a way for other chains to do it like to interoperate with nimble like could you have something outside interacting inside well yet another excellent question here so yeah there

are a lot of ways first of all it's the atomic swap which basically we have launched in the command line I think it was like July and now we're working hard on building it into our desktop and mobile wallets which allows you to have a completely trustless swap without any centralized Authority like you don't need an exchange to trade let's say Bitcoin or litecoin for beam in a way that none of the parties can cheat the other one how do you deal with price though like price Oracle's and like figuring out what the value is on each side we have added something that we called an atomic swap offers it's like a

screen that allows you to publish your proposal for a swap which indicates the going rate that you are willing to swap your Bitcoin or like on for beam or vice versa and if somebody accepts your swap you initiate the swap on the conditions that were published so we don't really rely on external Oracle's but of course obviously people will need to monitor the price to understand whether this specific swap is profitable or not I see and they wouldn't they'd have to be monitoring this somewhere else like basically on yes we are planning to add this feature into the wallet that will show you the price the actual price from the exchange directly but it still only works and it will probably release a little bit later do you imagine like so now there's a lot of at least there's attempts by some of the privacy tokens to get themselves

into existing wallets or existing platforms do you think something like beam remember Wimble in general is that possible or is it like you have to have the spoke like specified technology yes so we have been talking with quite a lot of different words and one of the biggest challenges there is that the difference between the way how we're used to do things in Bitcoin or like one or most other cryptocurrencies due to the interactive nature of moving ball so in limbo one would have to we have to involve both wallets in the process of creating a transaction they say you can't just know someone's address and

send him the coins because addresses are not stored in the blockchain yeah as I understood it it's it's interactive meaning you're gonna do is like a center and receive they don't have to be online at the same time but they have to be like willing to accept this exactly so using the SBS system you don't have to be online in exactly the same moment but yes you do have one round-trip or send and you know back to to the sender in order to create the transaction which makes it very difficult to integrate with existing wallets because almost all of them are using this existing model of having an address signing the transaction of line and then just sending it to the chain that said we have some interesting corporations that might happen in the near future of

wallets that do will - you know do some extra work and extend their model and integrate us into some existing political system I think it will be great we're very excited about it and looking forward to such corporations but once again yes it's much more difficult than just adding another year C 2010 or another coin that works in similar we have a little bit of a question for like the user experience here like would it be say downline or even maybe in the wallets that you've created would it be like I send a token and then it just says pending for a while and it could be like pending for a day or a week yeah that's exactly how it works and it shows

pending even with with that very wording I think or waiting for receiver it say something like that but there is a limit to how long it will keep it in in that way and right now the limit is 12 hours so if I send you if you give me your address which is like one actually an address and beam is a one time communication token in essence so your wallet creates this kind of can you send it to me it's called the address just to make the experience similar to all their other cryptocurrencies and then my wallet starts to post a message for your wallet and waits for your wallet to answer so if your wallet is not online it would wait for 12 hours and then it would just just cancel the transaction I say so if

the two wallets are online the experience is like very very seamless or if the second wallet comes online in after a certain period of time which is not too much then it's also kind of seamless how fast could it be if both were online and like really staring at there less than a minute I think it's pretty quick it's pretty quick so and then and then you know it's it's a two-way communication and then the the sender actually pushes the transaction to a node and then it's it gets into the block if there any is there any sort of like data field in Member Wimble can you also send other things along the way well you can right now we're not sending anything but in principle you could use

this messaging system to send additional stuff and we actually have plans to do that because when we're talking about the future like auditability features we can include collateral documents into the transaction I might send you money but then you can say okay I might offer because what my wallet does when it sends something says ok Ana my wallet wants to send you a hundred beam and it could say but I want an invoice from you or some sort of an ID or whatever so so you can't extend this system absolutely and also the remember we talked about the kernels so a transaction might have multiple kernels and that the additional kernels might contain additional information that can be used in the

future for example the offer board for the atomic swaps it's using the SBS system as an extension so we are already using this infrastructure for more than just creating transactions cool could you ever so one of the topics that sort of become interesting to me is this mixture of total privacy but with compliance like actually like allowing for I don't know taxes to be paid automatically legally like you know or check like you can check the science you can check the technology to be sure that it was done correctly however no other information is revealed and it may be is only revealed to like one source is there any way for a system like that to be built

in member wayneb are using member windmill yes that's that's exactly what we what our vision is to build a system like this where you are private meaning that nobody else can see your transactions or your history unless you let them okay because the you know the real privacy is it also includes the ability to share information in in a provable way right so so that's eventual to our billing and mimmo limbal is actually pretty a kind of seems pretty good for that because it has this extensibility but privacy is built-in so the vision is that all this additional

information will be stored off chain but with kind of links to the blockchain itself you know through storing hashes of all this additional information in kernels or something like this again we're still kind of debating on the executive limitations we have quite a lot of ideas and and then you come to a system where is as a user you are on the one hand fully confidential which is not true for aetherium Bitcoin and a lot of most most other currencies but would be very useful for any sort of business cases exactly but for a business case a business would not use something that is not reportable or not cannot pass AML controls not auditable in certain ways so so the trick here is to define the

exact amount of information that that can be revealed and to who without hurting the privacy and we think we have a pretty good idea of how to do that so we want a system where every user chooses their level of privacy like in cash I could be either fully confidential with my cash when I spend it but the business is that for example accept it they need to issue some sort of paper and then need to report it so we want to build something that mimics that use case alright so what's next for Beeman the future of bheem other than really cool like more cool names using beam having beam in it so I'll talk about the product side and Alex maybe we'll add

some something about technology so product wise our near future includes this atomic swaps marketplace and we're also starting to work on something called confidential assets where the idea is to bring additional kinds of assets of tokens for that matter from other blockchains for example from aetherium bring tokens to beam like not the tokens themselves but you know lock your die coins on aetherium and mint a beam die on beam and trade in full confidentiality Wow so that's that's the next big offering and further down the road it will be auditability so

these are the big like product miles so it will take time you know some of that might take months so we're just starting and then there is a technology roadmap so we we have several general directions of development that are currently actually in different phases so as alexander mentioned confidential assets is an ability to create new tokens on beam and immediately they have all the privacy features of being built in it's a very important feature which I think will be very useful for many different applications there is a lot of technological development involved in this building these assets on top of member wayneb all building the bridges

that allow to move them from different chains and to trade them in confidentially there is a lot of product there as well levantus as possible and very interesting improvement on the confidentiality we are also starting research into other very interesting technologies there is a lot of development going on right now in snarks specifically trustless starts without trusted set up which would be a huge thing there is a lot of work by different organizations and we are constantly monitoring monitoring the situation there because I think some of that might be relevant to us as well going forward that was actually another one of my questions is like will there be zero knowledge in this protocol and it sounds like yeah

it's impossible yeah today we have a small piece of zero knowledge called bulletproof which we use to prove that YouTube so value is actually positive so we have some of that but I think the Lantos also makes use of zero knowledge proof which are extended a little bit but I think in the next couple of years we will see a lot of developments in this field judging by previous experience this skill just exploded with interest from both practitioners and scientists it's going to be fascinating I think so we're monitoring that and of course there is the usual technological roadmap adding features like torrent I to P integration

and we have a lot of plans on improving the worlds even further we have to you know make the system more robust in the future maybe extending these atomic swap functionality to support more coins so yeah a lot of things are waiting for us and in the next year I think very cool all right well listen thank you so much for sitting down with me to do this interview thank you very much thanks a lot it was a real pleasure great questions thanks for coming I'm curious to hear where this goes in the future so thank you again and to our listeners thanks for listening