This, coupled with the fact that mining rewards can only be redeemed by the miners 100 blocks after they are mined, gives the miners a very large incentive to support only the network that they feel that they can safely extract value from by selling the tokens to cover their operational costs. As you can see, as the network becomes more unusable and expensive to transact, more people will tend to sell the token, making this a vicious cycle that will end in the chain frozen unable to process anything anymore. This self-fulfilling doomsday scenario, while seemingly very destructive, I believe was actually an intended feature of the original Bitcoin system. If it ever needed to be upgraded, the only way to do so such that all participants are migrated would be as follows: Developers are the first to propose a change, then miner support is the second group of supporters that need to be rounded up. Lastly, the major businesses in the industry such as exchanges need to be consulted, and that is it. Note that I left out the actual users or the 'validating node' operators.

The users have no power

. They can't be consulted. Because they cannot be

trusted.

They are a nebulous, decentralized body in the ecosystem and as such their opinions cannot be gleaned or their support objectively measured. They may be only a few, but seem like many due to sybil and sock puppet accounts on twitter and reddit; social marketing companies with paid troll armies ready at the keyboard to make a mountain out of every molehill, using manipulation and crowd mentality techniques to steer their agenda. This is why this group cannot be relied upon to make any sort of decisions in the upgrade process of Bitcoin. You never know if it is truly a massive grass roots groundswell of supporters,

or

if it is just a couple of well funded social media companies and a few ringleaders. In the age of 'fake news' this is one of the toughest challenges to overcome. That is why the Bitcoin way is just to ignore them, make the upgrade fork the chain with miner support, and enough businesses to sustain the new ecosystem. Then let the market determine the winner. Some will complain that this is disruptive and will incur real world costs. Well who said upgrades should be free of cost or risk? If we were running a centralized banking system, this risk can be mitigated because there is a liable party executing the upgrade. With a decentralized system like Bitcoin, without a central administrator, the costs to upgrade much be appropriately

higher