It does in fact give them power over the protocol. Their power comes from deciding which protocol to follow. If you want what they are selling (USD in this case) then you need to provide bitcoin that follows what *they* decide the protocol is.
The set of market participants on that side of the trade have 100% of the hard power over the protocol.
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I think we need to differentiate between consensus and mempool policy here. Also the scenario of a fork has a bit of nuance.
First… yes you’re right they totally will prevent anyone from giving them non consensus coins. So that’s an anchor of sorts against an unlikely scenario but only really relevant to their counterparty for that particular transaction- they still don’t influence policy at the protocol level.
They have a political voice for sure, but I’m not sure how relevant it is in the current debate since they don’t really USE the protocol. If anything, Saylor wants his “New York Real Estate” thesis to come true for block space so he’d be all for OP_RETURN expansion.
Again if there was a proposed fork- they might have a strong political voice but if you game out the mechanics of how this would go down their node has no influence at a protocol level. Where they might have influence is having a huge bag of forked coins to dump into the market…