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.
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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.
The humans who are doing the _most work_ by far in the bitcoin system are those that are mining blocks. They mine by to convert electricity, work and ingenuity into bitcoin. Miners get bitcoin from the Coinbase reward and from fees that users submit when transacting.
Spinning up, nodes without mining won't control the network.
This is true, but the nuance is that miners provide immutability as a service and don't actually have any power over the protocol.
