Looking at the Status ICO from the sideline I noticed that once the transactions with more than 50 Gwei as gas price were cleared, the transaction being approved by the contract all had a hash starting by 0x00... and the hex value was slowly increasing.
Here is one example : https://etherscan.io/tx/0x00785cad03de2e353f16f7efcc5a06c356dced3807fa52d293886cba3bc8214f
I also noticed that people are saying they're able to get transactions through by changing price and gas limit to generate a new raw transactions. They are reporting it to be "working" after 10 or 15 attempts. It sounds like that's what it takes to get a zero at the start of the hash.
I wrote a quick python script to confirm my theory, I generated a tx with a hash starting by 0x000 and it was mined in less than a minute with a 50Gwei gas price.
Can someone confirm my theory that the tx hash is the next criteria after the gas price ?