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?
Sorry for the late reply. I wasn't aware of this thread discussing Monero.
There was never any "crippling bloat." I'm not even sure what gmaxwell is talking about. There are certainly some forward-looking concerns about the future size of the blockchain (as with Bitcoin). But as of today there is no crippling. I run a Monero node on a smartphone-class nettop (just to see if I could), and it works fine.
There have been some growing pains. Early on the release one pool code didn't have a minimum payout threshold, so pools paid out on every block. Obviously that increased the volume of transactions, but the network still functioned normally and required no adjustment (save for fixing the pool code). And there was recently a spam attack on Monero and we responded by raising the (previously unrealistic <0.01 USD) default fee, but that only lasted a day or so and added 20 MB to the blockchain before the higher fee kicked in and the spammers stopped. Finally, the on-disk format is currently inefficient, and is being improved.
Still none of these issues have been crippling at all.