I don't understand.
They deleted Peter R. answer to my question about the relationship between the nodes and the consensus rules (I suppose that for being "off topic"), but they did not erase all other comments from other users on the same subject.
Yes. Moderation getting very partisan. And veering far from stated policies.
Here is what I wrote, that was deleted by the mods:
Nodes can influence the rule set and its enforcement in proportion to their share of the network hash power. This is Bitcoin's direct governance mechanism.
Market participants can influence the rule set and its enforcement in proportion to their economic power. This is Bitcoin's indirect governance mechanism.
A non-mining node by itself has no influence. This is easy to prove: if you run 100 raspberry-pi nodes, do you have more influence over the rule set and its enforcement than if you unplugged 99 of them? Of course not, because only the people behind those (non-mining) nodes matter, not the nodes themselves.Thats an oversimplification, if everyone were to run a node which differed from the consensus rules that all the miners ran, then someone is gonna change.
Probably, the miners will change to the rules of the nodes as they have more pressing bills to pay, this is of course the basis for UASF.
Collectively nodes indirectly dictate the rules.