10,000 nodes are only as powerful as the amount of trust the rest of the network lends to them. If nobody trusts those nodes, they will have no impact. If the n

10,000 nodes are only as powerful as the amount of trust the rest of the network lends to them. If nobody trusts those nodes, they will have no impact. If the nodes all trust each other and a single outside node trusts one of them, that node is worth 1 vote, not 10,000. Under the Stellar Consensus Protocol, the people you trust is your 'quorum slice.' If you take a transitive closure of trust over all slices, you'll arrive at the set of nodes you rely on. The most trusted nodes will appear in a lot of quorum slices, and essentially form a core trusted quorum. An algorithm similar to PAXOS is run by all nodes, but the results in the core quorum will override outer nodes until consensus is reached. Thus as long as no malignant nodes are in the core quorum, they will not impact consensus. If a node confirms something contrary to what everyone else confirms, you know it is malignant. And in the rare case that a malignant node becomes highly trusted (which would mean it isn't acting malignantly), then confirms contrary, Stellar prioritized safety and will come to a halt until trust graphs are readjusted to remove the bad actor (which removal can be done automatically if it's provably acting malignantly, i.e. signing invalid messages.)