It’s a fascinating time right now in the world of cryptocurrency. At the time of the writing of this article, for example, bitcoin is still in the midst of its comeback tour, slowly reversing the effects of a fourteen-months long bear market.
The upcoming halving of mining rewards and the Chinese-American trading wars may have something to do with this, but there is a sense of bullish optimism surrounding crypto right now. JPMorgan Chase is slowly backing away from its previous denouncement of bitcoin and Binance’s CEO made the well-lauded prediction that cryptocurrency use will outpace Internet use in the next few years.
Innovation in the community may be driving this optimism. The advent of satellite-based transaction delivery, for example, promises to offer access in areas currently underserved or unserved by traditional Internet providers. Entrepreneurship and ingenuity have always been strengths in the altcoin world and may be a key to the industry’s success. One example of this is Beam, which is one of the two altcoins based on the Mimblewimble protocol.
What Is Mimblewimble?
If you are scratching your head, thinking that Mimblewimble sounds like something that came from a Harry Potter book, you wouldn’t be wrong. Mimblewimble is a wizarding spell used to tongue-tie its target. It is also a transaction-conflating protocol that adds confidentiality and scalability to a token.
Mimblewimble, proposed in 2016 by the anonymous bitcoin developers’ chatroom user Tom Elvis Jedusor (another Harry Potter reference), uses blinding factors, or random numbers used to hide the number of tokens sent in a transaction, to ensure privacy.
Mimblewimble also uses CoinJoin to combine the transactions of multiple senders into one transaction, cut-through or the use of intermediary inputs and outputs in transaction chains, and kernel offset to promote the anonymity, scalability, and fungibility of a token. Due to Mimblewimble tokens not having a trackable wallet address, there is no fear of “tainted” or banned tokens, and due to the intermediate inputs and outputs, block sizes are smaller.
Theoretically, Mimblewimble tokens can overcome the hard limitations that are facing bitcoin and—to a lesser extent—Ethereum. Without an ICO or a premine, Beam launched to a less-than-stellar start, although it could potentially be the future of the industry. A proof-of-work token with a block generation time of 1,000 transactions or roughly one per minute, Beam is unique for instituting hard forks to promote ASIC resistance. Despite a spike and drop in pricing, Beam is currently performing better than Grin, although both are currently below their offering prices.
How to Buy Beam
Beam is available on several exchanges, including ABCC, BitMesh, BHex, Bkex, DragonEx, Huobi, and Stellarport. For this demonstration, we will be using Hotbit.
Hotbit may not be available in your country or local jurisdiction, so please be cautious of the securities purchasing requirements as they apply in your situation.
- Start by logging in to https://www.hotbit.io/exchange?symbol=BEAM_BTC.
- Log-in or register for a new account, if needed. Follow the directions on the screen.
- To trade, you will need to fund your account. Considering that you have previously completed the exchanges know-your-customer/anti-money laundering (KYC/AML) verification, you will be able to deposit USD into your account by using ePay. There will be a one percent transaction fee. On the main exchange dashboard, go to FundàDeposits & Withdrawals. Click on “Epay Deposits and Withdrawals.” Fill out your deposit information and click “Agree.” Proceed to ePay and complete the steps on the screen. Once completed, click “I have already paid” on the Confirm Payment screen.
(Courtesy: Beam) - Once completed, you can submit a buy order as you would on any other exchange. If you need assistance on how to make a buy or limit order on an exchange, please check out our tutorials on the matter.
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