Bitcoin resists pithy statements about who has the power. Be skeptical of anyone trying to dumb it down to "it's the miners" or "it's the nodes". It's a complicated system of checks and balances, by design, and the fact that all of this was thought through in depth and then proven in practice is the reason we're having this thread today.
This essay does a decent job of summarizing the checks and balances:
Majority of participants in the network. I run a full node, I don't mine, but my voice counts. Of course I don't like the weight of huge mining farms, and I hope there will be viable alternatives to proof of work, to make BTC more democratic.
In the meantime, not a single country controls BTC, and even heavy weight miners can't decide unilaterally...
Only miners really matter, if you only have a full node you don't have control over the network, just the ability to verify it. You will have to follow wherever the miners lead you.
The following is just my understanding, correct me if I'm wrong:
People don't connect directly to miners. They connect to nodes (8000+) which forward to miners. Nodes can declare an order is valid or invalid and they can blacklist bad-behaving miners. They can refuse nodes/miners that signal a change they don't agree with.
So I think full nodes are VERY important in the network and their voice counts. That's why I'm running one.
This essay does a decent job of summarizing the checks and balances:
https://medium.com/@twobitidiot/bitcoins-constitutional-cris...