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So the only way to speed up a transaction is to have someone purposely authenticating each low fee transaction to speed things along, or to put a high fee on it so people are more likely to want to mine it/it is pushed higher up the queue.
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Depends on what you mean by "speed up the transaction". As long as the transaction has a high enough priority or includes a sufficient fee, every peer will check that the transaction meets the rules of the protocol to be "valid" and will then relay it to all their connected peers. Usually within a few seconds you can expect that the transaction will have been received and verified by the vast majority of the nework.
However, the transaction is not considered "confirmed" until a miner somewhere includes it in a block. It doesn't matter if you put a huge fee or pay someone directly to try to mine it for you, until someone who attempts to include it in a block they are working on can successfully find a hash with a value lower than the target it will not be "confirmed". The amount of time that will take is entirely random (could be the next hash someone attempts, could be 90 minutes from now), but the protocol adjusts the target to try to keep the
average time between blocks around 10 minutes. You can't get a transaction confirmed any faster than the next block (whenever that happens to be).
But even then, I read yesterday that people discussing capping the transactions to 7 per second, is this for a stress test to see how Bitcoin would handle much large orders coming in per second, or is there some logic behind this to actually help how Bitcoin is run?
The only use I can see in this is a stress test to see how Bitcoin will run with a backlog of transactions
No, this is not something people are discussing doing, it is something people are discussing
undoing. The protocol as originally implemented has a maximum size for the block. No block is allowed to be larger than 1 megabyte. If you divide 1 megabyte by the average size of a typical transaction, you get something around 4,200 transactions. Since the average time between blocks is 10 minutes (600 seconds), this means that if the average transactions per second is higher than 7 for long enough, you will start to build up a backlog of low priority low fee transactions that couldn't fit in the block. Since there is a financial incentive for the miners to include the transactions that pay the highest fee per byte, this will likely result in people increasing their voluntary transaction fees to encourage miners to include their transaction. There is a concern by many that this will lead to a situation where the only transactions that ever get confirmed will be ones that are spending really large amounts of bitcoins, making bitcoin unusable for the average user.
There has been some discussion among the developers about changing the protocol to increase the maximum size of a block, but many are concerned that this could eventually lead to blocks that are so larger that the average user can no longer participate in running a full peer that validates and relays transactions. This could lead to a loss of decentralization until only a few "big players" with access to a lot of resources (especially extremely high speed internet) are essentially running the bitcoin network and imposing their will on others.
There are competing philosophies and legitimate concerns here, so nobody is rushing into doing anything, but at the rate that bitcoin is gaining popularity there is a sense of urgency to decide what to do about the situation (if anything) before bitcoin traffic consistently exceeds 7 transactions per second.
