Stress test suck, they delay a lot of my working schedule, and it is not fair for small users. There might be a need to do one every year or so, but to have Bitcoin malfunctioning for days really does harm.
No one could actually do something about it, everyone can do what they want to do in the network as there would be no regulations to stop them. With every stress-test, just think of something like this: someone is burning loads of money in order to push the network to its limit and strengthen it by doing so.
Weren't some devs suggested certain improvements to prevent these kind of stress tests. During the last stress test, I I have written the same post as yours, that we can't do anything about. But then one of the hero members has written that measures have taken places to prevent such stress tests in the future. I don't know is something like this possible, maybe somebody here has more info.
There are simple ways to filter out the spam transactions, but I'd rather not do it, just let the traffic fill the mempool and stress the nodes so that we can have a rough estimation what kind of load there will be if we use 8MB blocks (A total crash of almost every node maybe?)
The stress test is a good simulation of future when every block is full, we will see what kind of solution people will come up with when they experience delay in transaction
A typically reaction is to wait and combine several small transactions into a large one and send it with a higher fee (just like ATM cash withdraw in foreign country, you always do the maximum withdraw to reduce the impact of the fee since fee is fixed regardless of withdraw amount)
Then maybe rely on some online web wallet service since they typically combine lots of transactions into one thus can afford much larger fee
Anyway, currently the fee is really small, I guess most of the users will just raise the fee by 10x and be happy with it
Humans are forgiving
