how can you be so blind as to not see there is a 3rd option for users which prevents the miners from exercising this cartel gambit:  SELL.

if users get the sense that there is any funny business going on with the fundamental process of fairness and honesty that was "sold" to them in the first place when researching open source, transparent Bitcoin, they will "get out" by selling their coins.  this would crash the price and all the profits the miners were hoping to harvest would vanish in a second along with the multi-millions they invested in their mining equipment.  we know this b/c it is a voluntary system that has grown from nothing precisely b/c of these promises.  which is, btw, why i have such a problem with BS inserting a change into the source code meant precisely to benefit their business model.