The miners compete against each other, the nodes are for redundancy. As long as running a node is relatively accessible and there are enough distributed nodes to prevent denial of service attacks, the amount of nodes is not very important.
Nodes don't vote. They are just independent checkpoints which make sure that blocks are valid and reject invalid blocks.
So that's exactly my point. If the powers that be have more than 50% of the nodes they decide which blocks are valid and "Their" version of bitcoin takes precedence, no🤷🏻♂️?
No. If they change their rules then there becomes two different networks. Nothing changes for the old network, while the new network would start a separate history.
it's true, it's mainly miners who control the consensus
but they are not all thinking about next month, some of them have big stacks and are not allowing changes that would impact their stack value
they aren't all fiats, i repeat, they aren't all fiats... even if their default time preference as a business is high, they may be lower than that
