Edit: With respect to CryptoNote and Monero, I do see merit in the argument that the fee penalty alone may not be enough to constrain blocksize; however when combined with the difficulty increase requirement the picture changes. As for the specifics of the Monero blockchain there are also other factors including dust from mining pools that led to the early bloating, and we must also keep in mind the CryptoNote and Monero also have built in privacy which adds to the blocksize by its very nature.
Yes, its complicated but it's also concerning. The only altcoins that I'm aware of which have diverged from the current Bitcoin behavior in this front, and did so with the benefits of all the discussions we've had before being available to them, have been suffering from crippling bloat.
Glancing at
block explorers for Monero and ByteCoin... I'm not seeing crippling bloat right now. I see lots of very-few-transactions blocks.
Glancing at recent
release notes for ByteCoin, it looks like transactions were not being prioritized by fee, which is a fundamental to getting a working fee market.
Have Monero and ByteCoin fixed the bloat problem, or did the transaction spammers just get bored and go away?
Not sure about whether bloat has been addressed to the extent that it would need to be in Bytecoin (BCN), but I do know that recent updates dropped the default fee from 10 BCN to .01 BCN (1000 times cheaper), but the updates also provide that the user specifies what the fee will be so that the higher the fee, the faster the transaction makes it in, like this:
In this example, I've shown the general format for the transfer command and I've shown the -f (fee) as 10 bytecoin:
transfer
[-p payment_id] [-f fee] transfer 10 27sfd....kHfjnW 10000 -p cfrsgE...fdss -f 10
My understanding is that gmaxwell and andytoshi (et. al.?) have come up with "substantial cryptographic improvements" to the BCN system which potentially are a "pretty straight forward to add to Bitcoin" as per gmaxwell, see: https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/wizardry/brs-arbitrary-output-sizes.txt and previous comment(s) cited in this thread. However, I still have my (unanswered) questions, to wit:
How would this output-encoding scheme work realistically for something of *every possible size?*
Assuming this were applied to bitcoin as an option [much as SharedCoin is in blockchain.info], wouldn't it still come at a cost both in terms of size of the data corresponding to whatever transactions involved the scheme in the cases where users choose to utilize it, as well as corresponding additional fee(s)?
How are the scalability issue(s) addressed?