But, and what you
are ignoring (possibly purposefully) is that Verifying nodes maintain the valid ledger for
everyone other than the miners. If this independent decentralized ledger alerts the
community and economies that a miner or miners are building invalid blocks, everyone
other than the miners stop, not just the nodes, that is stupid. All users, developers,
exchange owners, and etc are immediately alerted to a possible problem and are
advised to halt until the issue is resolved. That is what Verifying Nodes do.
My whole argument is, that
no, they won't stop. Because they need to transact. You would probably be right with a technical incident, like happened in the past. Something that those causing it weren't even aware of, and say "oops, sorry for the inconvenience". Yes. But this is not what we are talking about this time. We are talking about economic and political choices. We are talking about miners that continue to make a valid chain according to the old rules, with the old software, ON PURPOSE.
And we are talking about users that want/need to transact. So what you are imagining, is that users are going to download, themselves, new software of which they KNOW that it will not agree with what miners are producing, to stop their own ability to transact, and think that:
1) they will do so and put themselves out of the system that way
2) this will affect the miners in any way
is totally misguided.
I would even say, even though it is bolder: if miners purposely decide themselves to modify their protocol (which is a difficult thing to do for them, and they can only consider that if they have a large majority, because they take the initiative to fork away), and ALL of them do so, then users and exchanges
still have to follow, because if they don't, they exclude themselves.
Technically, bitcoin is made such that as long as there is only one block chain out there, there's no choice but to use it or to leave it. If you leave it, you don't have access to your coins, you cannot transact, you cannot receive transactions. It is as if you left bitcoin. If you accept it, you accept the consensus protocol by which it is being built.
But in all of this, the essentially difficult and impossible step, is for those "stepping out". For miners, stepping out means MODIFYING the protocol they are used to. For full nodes, stepping out means: installing software that is not compatible with the actually made chain.
For miners, this implies that they fork away.
For nodes, it means that they stop.
This is the strong force of immutability. For every actor, it is individually a crazy thing to do to deviate from the actual consensus protocol. For miners, it means that they might start wasting all their hash rate. For nodes, it means that they exclude themselves, and cannot transact any more.