That’s not true. There is operational expenditure, like electricity cost, internet data, hardware that holds the client softwares, etc.

It’s just that the depreciation is slower, and less expensive over time than GPUs or ASICs.

Maybe this isn’t the case with some of the other DPoS chains out there, where people can delegate their stake to validators, making it unnecessary to run any hardware.

> and you can get it back when you unstake.

Interestingly, unstaking is not actually supported by the network yet so the staking only goes in one direction. The price and demand impact when that does go live will be interesting to watch.

All these are arguments in favour of PoS which I agree with.

They're arguments why PoS is centralizing.

How on earth have you come to the conclusion that not having operating expenses is centralizing?

Not OP, and not about opex specifically, but around PoS and centralization...

Before we had ~3 groups (miners, holders, users) that all kind of needed each other. Now there's no more miners. Given that crypto loves zero-trust and all that, I think it'll be an interesting experiment to see how the randomness of staking allocations plays out; if randomness streaks towards major capital, it'll look like they're favoring themselves and their stakes will accumulate %-wise increase at a higher rate (centralization!). The other "random-streak" outcomes aren't as bad (imo) and there's some game theory around this topic that I'm only topically versed in. Complicated by the part that miners did have some of their own problematic incentives and externalities.

In summary I view it as moving away from an unstable 3-body problem down to a more stable/centralized 2 bodies, one of which has greater influence. Hopefully good stewards and all that, but instead of forced cooperation among the 3 we now mostly trust 1 group.

Operating expenses force miners to spend at least some of their earned coins. Depreciation also means that you need to periodically recapitalize.

With PoS, without significant operating expenses, you can simply use your earnings to perpetually increase your stake.

There is no need to re-capitalise. It’s all opex if you want account for it accordingly.

Basically yes but in fairness there is a bit of operational expenditure. You need to pay a bit for energy (there is still a computer that needs to run), internet costs and your HW may need to be renewed every 5 years or so (perhaps longer). Typical costs of a normal consumer grade computer plugged to the internet, almost insignificant but not strictly zero.

The vast majority of stakers won't use their own hardware, but will stake with exchanges like Kraken and Coinbase.