Beam 2022 Week #36 - Sanction Censorship
Covering August 29th -September 4th 2022
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Beam News!
A big week for Beam with the Hard Fork taking place on the 2nd of September! A great success for Beamers the world over, and exciting times indeed for the Beam network.
Hard Fork!
The Hard Fork was successfully completed on the second. The fork went smoothly and without a hitch, with support from the community, miners, and exchanges seeing the network upgrade coming into effect with ease. This fork brought with it BIP 1, which updates the price for Confidential Asset issuance to 10 $BEAM, making privacy ever more accessible to all!
The latest fork sets the stage for the Beam ecosystem to push forward and thrive, with the launch of many a Dapp on the horizon. The launch of such unstoppable applications comes at an important time for crypto as a whole, as we start to see censorship ballooning following recent regulatory activities.
Censorship Resistance
One of the key components of Crypto and Web3 is the censorship resistance it achieves. This censorship resistance has come under strain recently, namely due to the regulatory issues surrounding Tornado Cash, a privacy protocol running on top of Ethereum, that was recently sanction by a sect of the USA government.
Although it is not the first time sanctions have been placed upon addresses, or entities involved in crypto, it is the first time that an open source protocol has itself been sanction. This caused a stir in the Crypto space, with many a great mind weighing in on what this means for crypto and thus censorship resistance in general.
As a privacy by default chain, this is of the utmost importance to Beam, as we look ahead to the build out of the decentralised applications that will power the ecosystem with privacy at their heart. A great overview of the situation, and how it effects Beam is shared below. A huge shout out to one of the finest Beamers out there, Danai, for putting this piece together.
As the article covers, a lot of the censorship taking place comes primarily from centralised aspects of projects and protocols. This has greatly influenced some of the Beam architectural design choices:
D²App Store
The vast majority of Dapps are hosted by centralised AWS style service providers. This presents a huge threat to censorship resistance as we have recently seen. Beam allows for DApps to be run locally, the DApps themselves to be distribute in packets for users to instal to their wallets. The D²App Store takes this a step further by allowing a decentralised distribution network for the decentralised applications.POW
Beam uses a proof-of-work (PoW) consensus mechanism to process and record transactions on the blockchain. This allows for private-by-default validation; allowing for a truly decentralised and censorship resistant network.Beam Wallet
Each Beam wallet runs a node by default. This is possible and practical due to the Mimblewimble base that Beam is built upon, providing scalability on the chain size side. This avoids any issues with the likes of RPC providers blacklisting addresses and contract calls.Addressless
As you know, Beam has no addresses in the general sense. For this reason it is futile to sanction Beam addresses as they are simply a means for wallets to open a communication channel with one and other, and no trace of them on the blockchain.
All in all, it is a great article covering the ins and outs of the sanctions, along with what it means for Beam. Be sure to check it out and leave a like and support for the great effort from Danai.
Privacy is a human right, and a key component in the fight for a censorship resistant future. Join us in it!
Beam Space
The last Beam Space we were joined by Dima, a stablecoin expert and connoisseur, as we took a look at all things Stablecoins. We compared collateralised and algorithmic stablecoins, and discussed the pros and cons of the various models.
Set your reminder for the next instalment of the Beam Space - The Great Miner Migration! We will take a look at where the Ethereum mining power will go post merge, when they switch to proof of stake. Join us to discuss, and find out why the best place to point your GPUs is Beam!
Day: September 11th
Time: 18:00 UTC
Location: Beam Twitter Space
See you there!
This comes with subtitles, making it easily translated to follow the space in your local language. Check it out and show some love!
Go Beamer Community!
Thanks to all those in support of the Beam Hard Fork! Shout out to:
Gate ❤️
Binance ❤️
Mining Pools and Raskul ❤️
Beam Bots ❤️
Mine Moar Beam!
Le Merge!
Tune In!
Fork Yeah!
That is all for this week, but be sure to sign up, and stay tuned for all things Beam.