A hard fork won't solve any real world problems. Just create more, by splitting the community in a brutal way. Many large and rich businesses, e.g. R3, want to destroy Bitcoin and create a new blockchain where they are in control, and they may have found the cheapest way to do it. Now they are in a hurry, since they know for a fact that segwit and the possibilities enabled by segwit will make a 51% attack their only option, and their investments until now will be lost. Their best hope is control over a hard fork by incompetent people, and a community hostile to progress.
QED. That is a solid theory, but to quote Harvey Keitel, "Let's not start suckin' each other dicks quite yet".
The purpose of the spamming could also be to keep nodes and their network links at peak capacity. It appears that there is a Bitcoin NETWORK LIMIT to the total transactions processed (NOT JUST the blocksize), and there is a system for FILTERING transactions. I believe that these limits are being approached commonly. Logically, people who have their transactions processed over others' are in a preferred position and therefore can CONTROL THE PRICE to some degree...
So maybe these hundreds of 5k-15k BTC transactions per day are big players transferring coin to one another with their resources pooled - perhaps they're just buying coin back and forth between hundreds of accounts with no net profit or loss? Such transactions, especially if prioritized higher, could have a dramatic influence on price. Logically, people invested in mining hardware would have an incentive to use such a system to keep the BTC price up... Would such actors want a blocksize increase? Or better control over spam transaction filtering? Or even a covert transaction prioritization system or network?
ALL JUST A THEORY... come at me, trolls.
