welp, I appreciate the gesture, but again I will put out there that in no official capacity am I associated with monero - I just think the technology is cool and generally want to see civilization advance into the future by using new technological developments.

I also found this interesting - Bitcoin giant BTCC launches priority blockchain transactions

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/bitcoin-giant-btcc-launches-priority-blockchain-transactions-its-customers-1529730

there's a bitcointalk thread about it: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1256357.0

I can't decide if this is the natural development of bitcoin's current protocol, or if this is setting a bad precedent. Well, to be honest I think its a bad development. IMO, this is proof that bitcoin is losing its egalitarian nature. If you own 11% of the hash, you can demand a premium. Add on top of this that its impossible to determine whether or not these are mafia tactics...

Furthermore, I speculate whether this type of system will ever have a chance of sprouting in the monero protocol. Our blocks would steadily increase in size during a blockchain DDoS (which I guess is the best name for the recent "stress tests"), so there would be a small window for a premium, but with our 2 minute blocks it would be short.

Finally, I ponder what monero can do in the face of a blockchain DDoS. Off the top of my head, I can't think of anything that wouldn't be filtering of transactions by pool ops. But I guess after the fact, there could be some outfit that determines which transactions were crap, and could distribute a patch so that blockchain maintainers could "pull out the weeds" from their blockchain by pruning....