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Miners are paid by the network to secure it.
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... actually "the network"="users" are currently only paying about 10%, miners pay for the rest.
Our blocks give us 12.5 BTC no matter what transactions there are out there.
The rest above the 12.5 BTC is the "users" paying to have transactions in our blocks ... including those who DON'T pay transaction fees - i.e. zero fee transactions.
... and just to point out something that MOST people seem to completely ignore:
A Bitcoin "user" can get in and out of Bitcoin with a single bitcoin transaction.
Being a miner requires an investment in Bitcoin that is often VERY large - some of the miners on my pool have invested millions of dollars into Bitcoin - and this is not a large pool - and that depends on Bitcoin working - they make their decisions based on that ... not based on often ignorant posts by people saying that SegWit is all good and no bad.
SegWit is going ahead anyway, to my dissatisfaction, but I also understand what you clearly do not understand:
Bitcoin is a peer2peer system, so the majority decides what Bitcoin
ISIf you don't like what Bitcoin
IS then go spend your one single transaction to escape from Bitcoin and go join some alt-coin scam that matches what you want.