Staking requires all those things too. Or you could pay a service to do it for you, but that applies to PoW mining as well.

Nothing against staking, but you and many other posters ITT are creating a blatant false equivalence between button-clicking and datacenter-construction. It’s not beyond the pale quite yet — we’ve all seen far worse from cryptocurrency promoters over the years — but you’re leaving open minded third parties little choice but to interject.

When’s the last time a billion dollar staking operation had to build multiple mining datacenters and fill them with hundreds of millions of dollars worth of hardware? That’s just not required for staking. It just isn’t. They’re not equivalent operations. Not in any way. Not by any stretch of the imagination.

> button-clicking and datacenter-construction

Which of these two scenarios seems to favour the rich, in your mind?

They both favour in different ways. You’d need to have huge initial capital, time and energy for mining, that’s quite a barrier to entry. Staking you’d need just large capital as the barrier.

I would say it’s harder to compete with miners than stakers.

Running a proof-of-work mining business isn’t risk-free: being wealthy alone is no guarantee of success. Conversely, with button clicking for autoyield, success is all but guaranteed.

There’s really no comparison. Running a business with high fixed and variable costs, and considerable competition is far more difficult to pull off successfully than a passive investment. Which one do you think favours a “gilded elite” more?

You're operating on the assumption that the elite make their money passively.

Putting money in a bank isn't even enough to keep up with inflation at the moment, the same is true for Proof of Stake coins, too.