Meet BEAM Ambassadors #10 — R.R. Hauxley — Krakow, Poland

Published in

BEAM Privacy

5 min readMar 27, 2019

As an integral part of our Blog, Beam is highlighting the fantastic Ambassadors helping us, day-after-day, build a fairer future where both paradigms of privacy and financial value are protected for individuals. Let’s meet R.R. Hauxley!

Who are you?

R.R. Hauxley here. I write my name like that because I’d like to be a well-known author someday — and this is how I practice. After all, the great authors I admire all had an R.R. somewhere in there (George R.R. Martin, J.R.R. Tolkien, etc). Yet for all my efforts at being a respected author, I’ve taken many different paths. My most recent involved filming a documentary. I traveled around the world for 1 year — on 1 Bitcoin.

22 countries, 12 months, all on 1 BTC.

It was the journey of a lifetime. Along the way I met and interviewed some of the sharpest, brightest, innovative minds in blockchain, including Vitalik Buterin — who is as close to an alien as I’ll ever meet. When I interviewed him he answered me in all clarity … yet I could tell his cogs were thinking about a dozen different far more important things.

Why Beam?

During these travels I also attended a meetup all about cryptography. It was December 2017, Hong Kong, and it must have been one of the very first presentations on MimbleWimble. The lady presenting the tech discussed it alongside ring signatures of Monero and Zk-snarks of Z-cash. Her vote, however, was on Mimblewimble.

Since that time I couldn’t get MW out of my head. The tech was and is fascinating, fair, and a whole new way to approach privacy with digital currency. For a year I googled it to see if any companies were working on implementation. Eventually, Beam and Grin popped up on my radar. Several months passed as I researched and watched these two projects develop their visions. I finally made my choice in January of 2019 — a year and a half after first learning about MW. My choice: Beam.

I chose Beam because I firmly believe in financial freedom. I believe privacy is a basic human right. No government or bank, no matter how well-intentioned, should have the right to monitor our money. Our money, every hard-earned penny, is the product of our time, of our skills, of who we are — if you think about it. After all, our money is how we live in this modern world. No way around it. Goes without saying that without money we could not have the basics of life: shelter, food, even personal safety. Once banks can monitor our money — they monitor our lives. There’s something fundamentally creepy about that.

“Beam is the antidote. Beam is financial freedom. Now I’m in control of my finances, in control of my freedom, in control. This is no exaggeration. The GUI wallet, the upcoming android wallet, all these will become an integral part of my life. Tools in the fight for financial control.

What do you enjoy working on?

This. This type of freedom is what I enjoy working on. The only skills I seem to have a teaspoon of are writing and communicating. Now I’ve found a way to put them to use. Too few people understand how valuable their financial freedom is. Too many people give it away without even realizing they are doing so. It’s one of those things we only miss when it’s gone. But when it’s gone — when you’re money becomes inflated past its value or when a bank shuts down your account or when you’re denied a home or an apartment because the bank knows every detail of your spending habits — that’s when this lesson hits hard.

This picture is a perfect example. Perhaps the majority of us have skimmed a headline about the crisis in Venezuela. Not many people get it though. So take a long look at that picture. A mob of Venezuelans descended on a bank, robbed it, and then scattered the money across the streets — burning it.

They robbed a bank and burned the money. Their government has driven their currency to such worthlessness. It’s a desperate, hopeless situation.

What do you want to see in a privacy-oriented digital world?

That is why I want to see a world where people have full control of their finances. The world doesn’t need to be privacy-oriented necessarily … just freedom oriented. This is the only way to build trust, after all.

Why should someone become a BEAM Ambassador?

This is the strongest case for becoming a Beam ambassador. A mission you can believe in. A mission that speaks to our basic human need for self-reliance, trust, and freedom. Mimblewimble is the technology that unshackles us from big brother, from the uneasy feeling of being constantly under the — rather creepy — watch of big banks, credit agencies, and all the other people at the top.