Uptrennd: 150 Beam Africa Writing Contest

Agbona Igwemoh

Published in

Beam Africa

4 min readMay 22, 2020

Hello Uptrennders!

Welcome to the Beam Africa sponsored writing contest!

Status: OPEN

Start Time: 8:00 AM WAT, Friday, 22nd May

End Time: 12:00 AM WAT Friday, 29th May

Details outlined at the bottom

This is a call to all the amazing writers on Uptrennd to the writing competition sponsored by Beam Africa!

Please ensure you read the contest topic carefully. Best of luck!

Prize Pool total: 150 Beam (Tradable on Binance)

1st Place: 30 Beam
2nd Place: 25 Beam
3rd Place: 20 Beam
4th Place: 15 Beam
5th Place: 10 Beam
6th — 30th: 2 Beam Bonus

Deadline: 1 week

All articles must be submitted within 1 week of this post to be considered

What is Beam?

Beam is a privacy-centric cryptocurrency based on the Mimblewimble protocol. Beam transactions are private by default, and storing the entire transaction history is not necessary for blockchain validation. This ultimately reduces the blockchain size and improves scalability. Beam supports many transaction types such as escrow transactions, time-locked transactions and atomic swaps. Ultimately, Beam is a store-of-value coin.

Beam official website

Beam Features

Stronger privacy controls are at the top of the list of Beam’s features. It’s believed that other privacy coins have defined a privacy model that only makes transactions private when specifically requested rather than adding privacy by default.

Beam reverses this and makes every transaction private by default. This means users are the only ones capable of determining what information is made publicly available, and keeps complete control of personal data in the hands of the users.

Beam has also introduced the concepts of confidential transactions and confidential assets as an added privacy value feature. This feature will allow for the creation of new digital asset types such as debt instruments, real estate assets, new currencies, all of which can easily be exchanged privately on the Beam platform.

While other blockchains have been struggling with scalability issues, Beam believes they’ve solved the issue by keeping a clean and compact blockchain. Transactions have been designed to avoid bloating, through the use of Mimblewimble protocol to prune old data that’s become irrelevant to current transaction processing needs.

Not only will this reduce bloat it will also reduce computational overhead demands, thus improving network scalability. Beam has been designed to be capable of supporting a variety of transaction types using its Scriptless Script technology. Besides simple value transfers, Beam also supports time-locked transfers, atomic swaps, and escrow payments.

Privacy will remain the top priority, but this feature also complies with existing regulations through the support of unforgeable digital wallet signatures. This will allow authorized auditors to see the full list of transactions and any relevant documentation.

Technology

Beam is based on Mimblewimble — an elegant protocol released by an anonymous developer in 2016. Named after a tongue-tying spell from the Harry Potter saga, Mimblewimble uses Pedersen Commitment scheme for full anonymity and zero-knowledge range proofs to ensure the validity of transaction amounts.

To enhance privacy and reduce the blockchain size, Mimblewimble merges all intermediate outputs within a single block and across multiple blocks, thus only storing the current UTXO state and making the blockchain size an order of magnitude smaller than in other leading currencies.

Beam implemented Mimblewimble from scratch using C++.

Beam blocks are mined using memory-hard Equihash Proof-of-Work algorithm. The block time is less than 1 minute on average.

More Information and Resources

Submission:

Write an article about Beam! Talk a little about the technology. Why is financial privacy important. The benefit of using Beam and give some use cases for Beam.
To submit, please do the following

Add “Beam privacy cryptocurrency” (without the quotes) in the title and body of your article
Post your article in the “Beam” community in Uptrennd
Link this post in your submission
Post the link to your article as a reply to this post
Upvote this article

Rules:

The article must be at least 200 words in length and recommended the length doesn’t exceed 1000 words
At least 65% of the article must be original. The use of word spinners will not be permitted
Rewards will be paid in Beam coin (tradeable on Binance) so, at the end of your article, add your Beam wallet address (download the Beam wallet here)
Tweet the link to your article and mention @beam_africa you can use any of the hashtags #PrivacyMatters #Mimblewimble

How the Winners are decided

The submitted articles will be reviewed by the Beam Africa team, and they will be responsible for deciding the winners and the top 30 articles. Some deciding factors to what a winning article should look like

Great spelling and grammar
Plagiarism free, and the appropriate use of “quote”
Use information and resources above to learn more about Beam
Articles can be edited up until the deadline