There are staking pools, just like there were mining pools.

You can mine with one GPU, pool or no.

Stake pooling also eliminates one of the supposed benefits of decentralised cryptocurrency - you have to trust someone else with your currency.

If I understand correctly, you are not trusting "someone", u are trusting the network itself. Imo no different than any other operation on the network. Any operation on the network requires trust that the network will do what it agreed it will do.

Staking pools are not part of the Ethereum network protocol - they are a third party that you need to trust with your Eth. You are lending your Eth to this third party, who will then participate in the Eth network on your behalf, and who is also under no particular requirement to do what they say they will.

If I have to give my currency to a third party who will then invest it for me, then why bother with decentralised cryptos at all?

>any operation on the network requires trust that the network will do what it agreed it will do.

If I were an Eth apologist, I would explain how the code that defines the network operations is fully open and inspectable, so no trust needed.

If you join a staking pool, then by definition you are increasing the centralization of the network.

There are decentralized staking pools. https://rocketpool.net/

32 eth is such a small investment that it isn't that meaningfully different than 1 eth.

Yeah, taking $4k (price it reached in the recent bull market).

$4k vs $128k

Literally the same numbers.

Right, parent is overstating it, and that's fair to call out, but it's still a low barrier to entry (even without the staking pools). At the current price (where anyone can get in), it's ~$1660, so 32 ETH would be ~$53k. How many "paycheck-to-paycheck" households blew that much on a fancy new pickup truck? Or home remodel? Or extra interest charges on the lifetime of a home loan from stretching their budget?

You’re joking right?

Am I joking about the quantities of money that working families will spend on unnecessary stuff instead of investments while complaining about the inability to secure their financial futures? I am not.

For the scales usually considered in the crypto scene these would be considered incidental