Quote from: YarkoL on January 28, 2016, 11:10:21 AM

there is a balance (or conflict) of power

Yes, but it does not play out equally in all respects: When it comes to mempool policy, miners have almost absolute power; no one else has almost any influence except via highly inefficient mechanisms like selling our coins and adopting a new cryptocurrency or hardforking the POW to fire the set of miners. The remedies are so costly that non-miners are basically deprived a voice, at least in any strong sense, on things related to mempool policy. Even a single moderate size miner has huge influence on mempool policy behavior, the action of a majority of miners isn't required.

When it comes to hardforking system rules, this balance is reversed. For those, a miner's opinion has almost no weight. A miner can only impose opinion there by stopping mining (if a miner produces a rule violating block, it's ignored as if it never happened). For that the users matter; and hopefully the users are prudent enough to understand that if they collectively act to harm a minority of users, they undermine the value argument for the system (... after all, why not you next?). (And perhaps developers matter a little there, since you need at least some people who are willing and able to develop to write the rules and maintain the system).

And this is all part of the intentional balance of power in the system. In an ideal world, Bitcoin would have no miners-- no even slight point of trust at all, just a purely flat p2p system. This isn't possible in the real world, so Bitcoin uses miners to determine the ordering of transactions but carefully confines them to control only the ordering; which is already very powerful-- it's what creates that near absolute control over mempool policy. That this point of trust is tightly confined.

Of course, many people wear multiple hats: I am own Bitcoins, I develop the Bitcoin protocol and applications, I mine Bitcoin, I help run a Bitcoin related business, I advocate Bitcoin to others, and I also use Bitcoin casually.-- and some authority someone lacks under one hat they may have under another.