Do you think Monero has a chance? I don't know how they can solve the problem of the bloated blockchain.. Monero's blockchain will grow like 8 times faster, nodes will become centralized at some point.
When talking about scaling problems, small constant factors don't matter. The transaction block chain concept is simply not scalable to very high currency usages. The idea that all agents have to be aware of all transactions everywhere of all the past, is simply not scalable. However, it can be useful for niche applications. Monero is on the niche application of private payments that cannot be done with fiat. I see this niche actually as the only useful one of crypto in its current state.
One should think of other crypto payment systems than everybody keeping the whole list of every single transaction that occured somewhere. That is simply a crazy idea. I'm working myself on a scheme that doesn't need that. One has to go back to the drawing board and try to remember what is essential in a currency: no double spends and right to spend. Of course, keeping a fucking list of all transactions done by everyone is a very crude way to establish this. The most naive one is bitcoins: keeping the explicit transactions readable. That gives away so much privacy information, that it is a night mare. Monero is smarter, and obfuscates this. Monero solves other problems that bitcoin has: block size adaption, tail emission (stabilizing against fee instabilities), regular hard forking, ....
Monero is really highly improved bitcoin.
But it still suffers from the basic problem that the right to spend needs that everyone has the (cryptographically obfuscated) list of all transactions of all of history. It is, like most crypto coins, still a "transaction ledger" that everyone has to have. So it cannot scale. It can scale better than silly bitcoin with hard limits, because it will be limited by resources and not by hard limits. But not all Germans can buy their coffee in the morning with Monero, no more than they can do it with bitcoin. With bitcoin, they will NEVER be able to do so ; with Monero, technology is not ready yet.
The other problem with monero is that it is a proof of work coin. As long as its block reward remains low enough, it will remain distributed. But from the moment that its block reward becomes sufficiently high to go to asics, it will be centralized. Unavoidable. But proof of stake is not a solution either. I think I have a solution, but one has to sacrifice to a certain extend "trustlessness" to obtain "decentralization permanence".
My idea is that from the purely technological view, monero, at this moment, is one of the best technologies one can have if one sticks to "transaction ledgers". I think that DASH is about the best technology that is out there if one sticks to "naive bitcoin crypto", but is way, way behind monero's tech.
As to ZCASH. ZCASH is clunky because it is a copy of bitcoin, but it has something brilliant to it: ZK proofs. It is a pity that this brilliant crypto tech is implanted on a clunky coin in a clumsy way. ZK proofs are even better in principle than monero's tech, if only it were correctly applied.
But none of them can become a genuine currency outside of a niche application. Because they all suffer from the "single block chain containing the world's transactions to be shared by everybody" in one way or another.