Only in your fanciful hyperreality does "miners can't mint 1m coins == miners have little to no power"
You are distorting what Prof. Sirer's essay actually says.
Perhaps if you bother to RTFA, its conclusions would seem less like "fanciful hyperreality."
Au contraire blackadder, I was *quoting* your characterisation of TFA
Miners have little to no power in Bitcoin. If you insist on hanging around and opining, you really should lean how all this stuff works.
Here's a good place to start:
http://hackingdistributed.com/2016/01/03/time-for-bitcoin-user-voice/It is a common misperception that Bitcoin miners determine the shape of the blockchain. So common, in fact, that I had an academic colleague fall into the same trap, where the thought miners could arbitrarily decide to mint 1 million coins for themselves.