FLETA aims to become the Google Android and Apple iOS of the blockchain market. To live up to such ambitious goals, we had to create a platform which is highly scalable, decentralized and has low latency. To do so, we had to incorporate some technological innovations within our platform. One of these innovations happens to be our blocks or to be more exact, the block size.

The words “block size” can pretty much cause a riot in the crypto community. This is the very reason why Bitcoin was split into Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash. So, in this article, we are going to give you a brief history of the block size debate and see whether increasing or decreasing the block size is the answer to scalability or not.

Origins of the block size controversy

The actual seeds of the block size debate can be traced way back to Satoshi Nakamoto, the anonymous creator of Bitcoin was forced to give a 1-MB size limit to the blocks in his blockchain. According to him, a size-limit will reduce the number of spam transactions within each block. However, over the years, Bitcoin became more and more popular and its usage increased exponentially. As a result, Bitcoin started suffering from scalability issues and the community was desperately searching for solutions.

The solution, according to a section of the community, was pretty simple. Remove the block size limit and that will increase the number of transactions that each block can carry and hence increase scalability. Pretty simple, right? Unfortunately, it wasn’t. The issue soon grew out of proportion and it divided the community into the ones who were in favor of the block-size increase and those who weren’t and were looking into SegWit implementation as a possible solution. Let’s look at the arguments made by both sides.

Arguments for the block size increase

Miners will significantly benefit from increased block size since more size means more transactions and hence more transaction fees collected per block.

The scalability issues are greatly hampering bitcoin from performings its functions. Increase the block size will improve scalability.

SegWit will bring a whole lot of complications to Bitcoin’s original architecture.

Arguments for the block size increase

Miners will lose incentive because transactions fees will decrease. Since the number of transactions entering the block will increase, it will reduce the fees associated with the transactions. Lesser miners will mean lesser network hashrate.

Block size increase will cause the system to fork and make two parallel Bitcoins. This will inevitably split up the community.

The SegWit solution would address the scalability issue without forcing the network to go through a hard fork.

Increasing the block size will increase centralization. We will discuss this more in the next section.

Unfortunately, the community couldn’t come to a consensus and Bitcoin got split up into Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash. Ever since then, many members of the crypto community have recently questioned if increasing the block size is the correct way to go. In fact, many argue that decreasing the block size may be more beneficial to overall network health.

Does the answer lie in decreasing the block size?

The biggest problem with increasing block size is centralization. Mining large blocks will require a large amount of processing power. This will take out all the small mining pools and give mining powers exclusively to the large scale pools. Plus, in a network with large blocks, the nodes will need higher-end hardware for propagation. What this unfortunately means is that decentralization is going to be compromised since it won’t be sustainable for everyone cost-wise.

We didn’t want FLETA to be centralized. We wanted to make our network decentralized and fast. This is why we went the other way and decreased the overall block size. Our patented block structure (United States Patent Application Number: 62717703) has reduced the block size (by 43%) and the index volume needed for operation to increase the overall transaction processing speed by 1.8 times.

Conclusion: Decentralization and Speed

What are the two things that a high-quality smart contract platform must provide? Speed and decentralization. Currently, we have platforms that emphasize speed while compromising on decentralization (like EOS), or we have platforms that emphasize decentralization while compromising on speed (like Ethereum). We believe that with our restructured blocks, we will be able to give developers a platform that will remain highly decentralized without compromising on speed.