The idea is interesting, but I do not quite understand the logic. Even if some dishonest mining pool manager artificially inflates the price of transactions, he has no guarantees that it is his pool that will catch the next block, which means there is a fairly high probability that his overpriced commission will go to another pool and he will simply lose his money. Or am I not understanding something?
first of all a pool manager does not need to pre-relay his zero confirm tx to the network. he can just make a tx and keep it for his own block template. and if the next block is not solved by him he just puts the same unbroadcast tx into the next template.. thus other pools dont steal the tx and take the fee
second of all there are a few pools doing this so they are collaborating.. its not like its just one pool spamming fee's, they all suddenly want to push fee's up to extremes. which for the last decade they did not show any great greed to want to resort to these tactics.. but all of a sudden now they are in greed season. and no
individual users with home asics dont have a say in which transactions are added so its not miners demands. its pool manager greed/effect
thirdly some are broadcasting transactions pre confirm to each other.. or the spammers are sponsoring several pools and whomever gets added first wins.. so i doubt they care much about losing some tx to some other pool. after all if the main top pools are doing it they end up passing each other funds so it ends up equalling out... and are probably being funded by idiot a-holes to spam the network
I'm not a big fan of conspiracy theories, but yours is quite interesting and I would take it much more lightly if a few previous conspiracy theories that I also found interesting didn't prove to be true. Thank you.
In general, the problem of malicious cooperation of managers of large pools is quite serious. It seems that Satoshi believed that malicious cooperation was not profitable because they were too financially interested in the overall success of bitcoin as a commercial enterprise to deliberately try to discredit it. But I believe that this is not a strong enough argument, because pool owners can receive material or non-material incentives from third parties that may outweigh their possible losses from actions aimed at discrediting Bitcoin.