However, I think whales will end up demanding a kickback from miners for their transaction fees, so that miners can jack up fees on non-whales. Whales can make this demand because they can refuse to send their transactions to miners which won't deal. Yet non-whales can't make a credible threat, because miners who generally offered lower fees would end up losing hashrate relative to those miners who didn't defect from the fee market. Thus I think you will probably see miners colluding to extract the maximum fees that gouge non-whales.