PSA: Nodes have more control over the protocol than miners

I see a lot of exaggerated reactions to the news that some rich folks are talking about some green mining cartel. It leads me to believe many here don't understand who decides what makes Bitcoin, well, Bitcoin.

The gist of it is this: if they want to self-impose some rules regarding mining (more specifically: the energy source used), let them go ahead, because it won't have an effect on the protocol level.

Bitcoin is the term used for many different parts of the Bitcoin machine. It describes both the ecosystem, the token, the network, the protocol, etc. Bitcoin is not something straightforward, which makes it so difficult to explain in layman's terms. Rather it is a balanced act of several different concepts, technical, economical and political.

The role of a miner is very different from that of a node. Unfortunately many here fail to understand this difference and attribute way too much power and control to the miners, while it is in fact the nodes that ultimately decide what it is we call Bitcoin. Attempts by miners to assert control over the blockchain have happened in the past, and they did not end in favor of the miners. Any attempt this time around to assert control through politics and legislation won't work either.

Any miner can decide which transactions to include or not include in his block. But one single miner can't mine all the blocks. If the green mining cartel on the other hand decides to fork with their 'clean version' of the blockchain, whatever that means, they are free to do so, but they won't have an economic majority behind them, which means they will lose money, because they don't get to decide what Bitcoin is, nodes do.

tl;dr run a node, read Mastering Bitcoin by Andreas Antonopoulos, chuckle at this meaningless green cartel mining crap, good night