I don’t know. Maybe it wouldn’t. The argument was that nodes have to validate transactions to be relevant. So I said, ‘why cant they send transactions to themselves? It doenst cost much. Then they dominate the network and champion of a fork.’ I don’t know enough to know if this works. It is a question.

You need to be producing/trading something of value in exchange for bitcoin in order for your act of transaction verification to have an impact on the network. If the bitcoin you receive does not comply with your version of the protocol then verification fails and you stop providing economic value to whoever sent you the "bitcoin". The rolling set of people doing this determine what the protocol is.