No, miners are far more powerful than all the other stakeholders. While acceptance by merchants is a relevant factor, miners also have to facilitate any transaction. Any fork without miners is instantly unable to transact, making the coins useless and therefore worthless.
>Any fork without miners is instantly unable to transact, making the coins useless and therefore worthless.
The incentive structure discourages this. If half the hash power goes off to mine Bitcoin Infinite (the fork with uncapped Bitcoin generation), then mining the original Bitcoin would be twice as lucrative because there's half the competition. This gets better the more miners leave. If 95% of miners leave for Bitcoin Infinite, then mining Bitcoin becomes 20x more lucrative. There's the matter of the difficulty adjustment, but that has been historically dealt with using emergency difficulty adjustments.
Meanwhile, the miners who are mining the fork have real expenses (electricity, equipment), which need to be paid, and if there isn't sufficient demand for their Bitcoin Infinite coins, they'll quickly go bankrupt. Some napkin math:
* If the hash and economic power are both split 50-50, then there will be little impact in profitability, but also little impact on Bitcoin
* If 90% of the mining power goes to Bitcoin Infinite and only 25% of the economic power follows them, then the miners can expect to see a 72% drop in revenue. If their original profit margins were 20%, they can expect their profit margins to drop to -66%. If we use the price/generation rate of just prior to the last halving (May 2020), then that would represent a loss of $9.9M per day (not including opportunity costs/lost profits).
The incentive structure falls apart once Bitcoin original runs out of blocks to mine. That’s the starting point for this discussion.
The only incentive to mine then is to earn the transaction fee. These fees ($8) are currently orders of magnitude smaller than the mining reward of 6.25 coins ($125,000 at $20,000/coin). Either fees have to dramatically compensate by rising stratospherically or miners will depart for greener pastures. Yes, difficulty level drops eventually, but by then a large number of users have also followed miners off the network, in which case the price will drop too. As the price collapses, there will be a selling frenzy, further reducing the price. In this scenario, Bitcoin may settle to something as low as $10 per token.
Once miners depart en masse, network resilience will drop precipitously. That makes it an attractive target for someone to stage a coordinated attack, which would destroy remaining residual trust in the network and bringing about the end of Bitcoin original.
