XMR is a valid competition. Blockchain bloat is not a valid cause of concern to the investor types.
Why the bloat wouldn't concern investors?
I can buy a 1 terrabyte hard drive for $40. Storage is cheap. Moreover, what percent of users actually even have a copy of the blockchain? I'd imagine the majority are using blockchain.info/electrum/coinbase/etc. so storage isn't a concern at all for them.
The bitcoin blockchain currently is roughly 19 gigabytes. So if it got to be at bitcoins current state, there would have to be 5200% bloat before it would fill up a $40 hard drive.
So to me, blockchain size is virtually irrelevant, unless we're talking about something astronomically bigger than a coin which has > 40 million transactions and is 5 years old.
This also completely ignores the concept of pruning old transactions, which can be done if need be.
tl;dr: I get that this is the darkcoin thread (which is the only altcoin I own _any_ of btw.), but let's not spread false FUD about other coins, we should be above that.
The bloating issue of ring signatures is real, pointing out a problem in a competitors model is not FUD if its real. You are minimizing the issue but are not providing backup information about the Cryptonote bloating issue because they dont even know yet either exactly how they are going to handle it, is new technology it may prove to be a non issue like you are saying or it may prove to be a big issue, we will see but it is definitely not FUD.