It costs less to stake, but it pays less too. Ethereum's staking rewards are an order of magnitude lower than its mining rewards.

The minimum amount required to stake is 32 ETH. That’s $75k at today’s price. There are cheaper was to “stake” but those are not really “ETH PoS” staking. So no, it does not “cost less to stake”.

There are ways to have a fractionalized stake, essentially the PoS equivalent of participating in a PoW mining pool. They call them staking pools, which seems logical enough.

https://stakingether.com/

https://rocketpool.net/

https://beaconcha.in/stakingServices

I agree with you of course, but those are not “ETH PoS” staking, strictly speaking. They are just layers on top. You definitely make more running your own validators.

What are you comparing $75k to? My understanding is meaningful mining under PoW requires buying expensive mining hardware that goes out of date quickly. Under PoS there is no such depreciation...a laptop from 2020 will likely be able to run PoS in 2040.

I personally have been mining ETH for years with equipment I bought for $20k in 2017 - 2018. I’ve made many times my investment back. That same equipment is still running profitably today.

Are you ASIC or GPU mining?

I have 30 GTX 1070 GPUs.

And what do you plan to do after the switch to proof of stake?

If I have enough, I will run a validator. If not I will probably do some defi like lido + curve + yearn. I may also mine something else like flux or raven.

There's initial capital expense, and ongoing expense. You're of course correct that the minimum capital is lower with mining. However, given a $75K initial investment, a miner has much higher ongoing expense.

That's not necessarily true. Some people mine with 100% solar power and their ongoing expenses are almost zero.

So, my original point was to respond to the above comment: "Proof of stake requires none other than a single purchase to be gifted the right to perpetual seignorage."

My claim was that the lower ongoing expense of staking is compensated by lower rewards, so that both systems have similar profit for similar capital outlay. In setups where mining expense is almost zero, the higher rewards of mining give it much more seignorage than proof of stake.

…and to maintain (or pay a host to maintain) a node.

I suppose so. If you're payment to an agent to carry out either task, the downstream complexity of the task is irrelevant because the difficulty to you is the same.