You state that Validator nodes have no power and it is a myth that they have any impact on the network.
Sorry. dinofelis is correct. Non-mining nodes have essentially zero power of enforcement.
When faced with a block, a node has two possibilities. It can accept that block and forward it, or it can consider it an invalid block and not forward it. That is all. What it cannot do is prevent that block from getting to another miner that is perfectly happy to create another block on top of it. If miners are extending the chain, demonstrably accepting those blocks by building other blocks atop them, there is doodly-squat that non-mining nodes can do about it.
apart from consider it an invalid block and not forward it.
EG 2 pools right now could play hot-potato agreeing to make blocks that are segwit capable.. but try pushing those out to non-segwit nodes.. and the nodes reject them (hence why core needs the upstream filters inplace to then strip the blocks to make it non-core compatible)
EG 2 pools right now could play hot-potato agreeing to make blocks that are dynamic over 1mb.. try pushing those out to non-dynamic nodes.. and the nodes reject them(hence why node(hard) consensus needs to be achieved where the majority can accept them)
dinofelis's notion is of a centralised network. he doesnt understand the deeper aspects.
EG pools are competing. they will find any rule breaking reason to avoid accepting another pools block for own greed and assurance of healthy data/network
also merchants can be/are nodes. meaning pools become dependant on nodes if they ever want to spend their coins.
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yes pools can just be 2 pools happily playing hot potato together.. but then thats just a crap coin of 2 users filling their hard drive. they might aswell go to a bank and open a joint bank account if they are only playing with each other. why even use blockchain tech at all if 2 pools are the entire network automatically accepting eachother.
but with thousands of nodes where some are services some are merchants the onus on who self governs what, switches. where by the acceptability of a blocks reward becomes the choice of the nodes. because the nodes are the merchants and services the pools wish to spend the funds with.
merchants could for instance see the 2 pools playing hot potato. and instead the nodes decide to let them play hot potato between themselves and orphan and ban them.. the nodes then start solo mining or using their own asics and leaving the 2 hot-potato pools on their own minority network, ignored by all the nodes whereby the pools cant spend funds with those merchants/nodes