Even this uncertainty has made one decision for me.
I've been thinking over getting new mining equipment. This confirms to me that it's definitely, definitely too much risk. Until we have a clear way forward, I cannot commit to something that could be a dead loss in 6-12 months.
If a movement amongst miners started to use mining to ban clean addresses from the blockchain, I would step up and even swallow a loss, but only if it had a good chance to break the usability of the clean list.
I like your idea Carlton, get the miners to stop it in it's tracks. I bet Xperian and Equifax are salivating at Mike Hearn's suggestion.
I'm not sure that this is possible in the way I'm presenting it without a change to the current mining protocol. There are sensible reasons to prevent it, as it creates a market for miners to accept personal vendettas against certain addresses, which is precisely the mechanism I'm arguing for. But in the name of only targeting the clean list.
Perhaps it might be possible to query all public Bitcoin nodes to see which addresses they are blacklisting. Then at least you can identify who is blocking you. The truth is that all solutions to this problem are a compromise, we're working with an information system here, and for it to be in any way useful, it must permit misuse as well. Storing non transaction information in the blockchain being just one example of misusing the innovation, people always worked around any attempt to stop it, so Gavin Andresen moved to standardise it instead.