If they create a fork, then no one will use their fork, which will be a billion dollar waste of money. Bitcoin in its essential are a consensus reached among its users, voluntarily participating. You can not force people to use certain fork of bitcoin. Large mining pools can indeed modify transactions and even do double spending if they control majority of the hash power, but they can not affect the existing coins, which is the major usage of bitcoin right now: Long term store of value. Constant turbulence in transaction space will just drive the demand to long term saving area

When banks froze Greece bank accounts, they definitely raise the value of euro in the eyes of Greece people, and Greece parliament passed an even more strict austerity proposal to get those euros  

And since majority of the bitcoins are being used as long term storage, the raised fee will not affect most of the users, only exchanges and payment processors. Long term savers with more than 10 bitcoins does not care if they should pay 0.01 or even 0.1 bitcoins for a 10 bitcoin transaction

Money must be spent to show its effect of control. With bitcoin you can only spend it once, then you give up that power of control to those who earned the coin. To get back those coins, you must work just like anyone else. But with endless money printing by central banks, that power of control stays forever

Of course it is not, it is the most advanced value certificate that human has ever created, all currencies are like from stone age when comparing with bitcoin

Is that possible?

His average cost for spam is 1000 coin/block, but his average income is not 2000 coin/block. Because even there are 2000 transactions with a fee of 1 BTC stay at the top of the queue and get transacted immediately, the rest 4000 transactions might still pay a fee of  0.01 bitcoin, they were just pushed back in the queue, not obliged to follow the highest paying fee. The fee would only rise to 1 coin/tx if all those transactions are willing to pay for that. In a word, the spammer can only raise the fee to the amount of money he spent, the rest is not up to him

And of course he could spend huge and spam all the 6000 transactions with 1 coin/tx to occupy all the block space, then as you said that will only benefit the non-spamming miners, and those miners would still include the transactions that they want to broadcast in their blocks with a minimum fee (like exchange-mining farm cooperation)

Suppose that there are 10 blocks, each with a fee of 2 btc (in future). Now a large mining pool commanding 50% of hash power decided to spam the network and raise the fee for each block to 3 btc. So he spend 1 bitcoin at each block as fee for his spamming transactions, that's 10 bitcoins total, and he mined 5 of them back, his net loss is 5 bitcoins, how would he become profitable?

Today's Greek parliament vote proved that money really controls everything, thus who create money will control the world. But in this sense, giving up the money creation right to someone else must be the most stupid move a country can make

Increased activity of coin transaction will just make coin less available in circulation, thus raise its value. The more you attack the network, the stronger it grows, it absorbs all the energy that fed into it

bitcoin.conf

minrelaytxfee=0.0002

 

Something very easy to remember for you but impossible to guess or brute force for others... What if you are kidnapped? Get some bodyguards before doing this 

The majority of the actors are ignorant, a few wise mind who understand the truth won't change anything. Even everyone have internet access, most of them are still ignorant

But with bitcoin these a few pioneer can seek their paradise in another monetary system, and after they got very success, people will blindly follow as before

From macro level, fiat money disappears when the trust to that currency is totally broken, for example Zimbabwe dollar

It is very easy to break that trust while difficult to maintain it: If suddenly it requires 10X more dollar to eat a hamburg, then everything's price will explode and government suddenly lose the ability to purchase or drive any project with the money they have (even banks raise the interest to 20%), then their only choice is to print more money to handle the situation, which make the situation even worse. So once that trust is broken, there is almost no way to prevent the collapse

But so far, people's trust to fiat money is still intact, this is because they don't have any knowledge about modern money creation

Speculators need more dose 

Could this attack itself partially initiated by large mining pools? Because they get part of the spam coin back through fee, it does not cost them too much, but it will make lots of coins on market occupied during the attack, thus raise the exchange rate. With more and more coins trapped in unconfirmed status, the coin supply on market will become less and less, a great help for the speculators who are pumping up the price at the same time

Value is all subjective, for certain people bitcoin has huge value, for some others it worth nothing

This is merely a simulation about potential bank attack scenario when bitcoin really take over traditional banking services  

At its extreme, banks could print several billion dollars per day to facilitate magnitudes larger scale attack, in order to totally stop bitcoin network. But this simulation proved 3 things:

1. the attack won't stop the network totally, someone who are willing to pay a higher fee would not be affected, and because majority of coins are used for long term storage, people have the option to wait

2. nodes have certain flexibility to exclude spamming transactions, so that even some nodes were brought down by the excessive loads on mempool, many other nodes will just add some filter based on the attack, so the money spent on attack will basically achieve nothing but enrich miners

3. the exchange rate will jump during the attack, due to transaction capacity now becomes scarce and demand is even higher than before

And the exchange rate just jumped. This again proved that bitcoin's value is not mainly decided by its payment function, but investment and speculation, both do not require a high transaction frequency, and can afford to pay a high fee to get the payment done when needed

The other use cases are international remittance and drug dealing, again both are typical large transactions over $50, so even the fee rises to $1 (e.g. 0.003 btc), it is still acceptable

Perfect timing, someone is selling huge amount of litecoin today, price dropped 50% in a couple of hours, again proved that litecoin is a pump and dump instrument

It is similar on bitcoin, obviously a planned pump by Chinese exchanges, all of them showing a large spike of short squeeze, I guess all the people who were shorting bitcoin were wiped out

Someone is cashing out litecoin big time 

Mine 1-week-uptime node's getmempoolinfo shows 5xxxx for size and 124xxxxxx for bytes, 5 minutes after a restart of the process, size become 1476 and bytes become 3xxxxxx, let's see what it will finally show, I guess after 6 hours it will catch up with the rest of the nodes