You could just as well say that Newton was a paid or an unpaid shill of the laws of gravity.  As I said, bitcoin is a dynamical system, and we have to discover its dynamical laws (of which we know its basis: game theory, but we don't know the cost functions of the entities, although we can make reasonable assumptions about it).  

If I'm complaining about anything, it is about people's lack of rational insight, and emotional ties to certain positions - usually based upon the confusion between intend and consequence, and their total lack of insight into the *actual* workings of the system they talk about.  This leads them to propagate opposition to certain solutions on the basis of false arguments.  The principal one is of course the idea that one shouldn't increase block size because that would drop the number of Joe's running full nodes in their basement "to keep bitcoin decentralized", while the number of Joe's running full nodes in their basement is absolutely of no importance what so ever in the power structure of the system.


I think you are missing the principal basis of game theory, which is the *individual decision* of an entity as a function of his own advantages and disadvantages ; the behaviour of the overall system is a consequence of these individual decisions, and individual decisions are not taken as a function of the overall desired consequence (call it the tragedy of the commons).

The only users that matter for miners, are BUYERS of coins.  The OWNERS of coins are not the ones that are going to pay miners.  A miner will individually make the decision to change the block chain he is making (change the protocol) if he thinks that his individual change will let him obtain more value for the coins he obtains this way, than if he doesn't change his protocol.  There is a very strong incentive for miners to stick to the protocol the rest of the miners is sticking to: changing *on your own* is almost always a losing proposition, because most probably, the chain you will be making, with minority hash rate and modified protocol, will most probably NOT find a lot of buyers.  This is where your *miners follow the money* comes in.

Users in the sense of stake holders, are more victims than market players in fact.  The stash they own on a chain, is dependent on their ability to transact, for which they are dependent on the miners including the transactions in a chain they are willing to make.  For that, these users have to "bribe" the miners with a fee, and be willing to use the chain the miners are offering.  These users are totally at the mercy of miners, because the miners can decide over their possession, and the miners are not interested in their possession ; the only thing miners want, is NEW users buying their coins, not "old users" needing to transact.

If you have a million coins in BTC, you have to pray that a miner is going to be willing to include your transactions in a chain of his liking he's making for you.  The miner doesn't care about your possession, but you do.  The miner cares about people buying the coins he's making on the chain, not about the owners of coins that are going to transact ; apart from the fact that these owners need to pay for the favour of including a transaction in the chain they make.



Yes, but worker unions can only obtain stuff because the legal system intervenes.  Worker unions without any legal backing break up, because some workers want to eat and break the cartel.  BTW, that's also why you have employer's syndicates.  But all these things are centralized entities.   In fact, miner "worker unions" (miner cartels) are much, much more probable than "bitcoin users forming a worker's union", simply because the miners don't care about most of the bitcoin OWNERS.  They only care about bitcoin BUYERS.   The owners are at their mercy.  Not the other way around.

A miner cartel, to be made of, say, 20 entities, is way, way, way easier to form than a user cartel, made of millions of new users/buyers.  In any  case, if such a cartel is working, the system has lost its decentralized aspect.  

The only thing that is still holding back the power of miners, is the visible incapacity of them finding a decent group of developers.  That's scary because a crypto is not really a big or difficult software project once you lay out the protocol to implement.