this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2025
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No, it's not. Ether is not a governance token, Ether holders have no influence over the rules of the blockchain. This is a very common misconception and I can understand why it's easy to fall into, but consider it this way; when someone puts up a stake they are not buying "influence" over the blockchain, they are giving the blockchain a hostage. They're putting their money under the control of a contract that will destroy their money if they do anything that contravenes the rules of the blockchain.
So who gets to decide what rules the blockchain runs under? Everyone who uses it. They're the ones who are generating transactions, and those transactions are cryptographically signed to work on the particular version of the blockchain that they want to use. If they collectively decide to switch to a different version of the blockchain then they collectively change what version of the blockchain their transactions are going to. If the stakers don't go along with that transition then they're left holding Ether on a blockchain that nobody is using, which means that Ether is valueless.
This isn't hypothetical. Ethereum undergoes routine hard forks to upgrade the network, adding new features. Proof-of-stake itself was one such upgrade. There have been subsequent upgrades that did things to the network that the stakers probably weren't happy with - notably the one that added EIP-1559, a change that causes transaction fees to be burned rather than giving them to the stakers. It was a change that literally took money out of the hands of the stakers. But they went along with it because they had to. They were not in charge.
How easily can you get into Bitcoin mining right now? Regular computer hardware doesn't cut it, hasn't cut it for a long time. You need a purpose-built ASIC, a piece of specialist hardware that is only manufactured by a handful of computer hardware companies. You'll also need extremely cheap electricity, which you won't be getting out of the wall of your house. You'll need an industrial power feed, probably located somewhere near a power plant with excess capacity where you can get it particularly cheap.
If you want to set up a solo Ethereum validator, all you need to do is buy ~$120,000 worth of Ether and make a transaction to stake it. You can do that anywhere. No special hardware is needed, no ongoing significant power cost. You do need a reasonably stable internet connection, but it doesn't have to be a high-speed one. You could probably do it from a cabin in the woods over Starlink. Nobody can stop you. Nobody will even know who you are.
If $120,000 is a bit much for you (it's still far less than would be required for a Bitcoin mining farm) and you don't mind a little bit of reliance on third parties, you could buy some liquid staking tokens. Spend as little as you want, they subdivide. Or wait a little while, Ethereum's devs are mulling a proposal to reduce the minimum stake from 32 Ether to 1 Ether. That'll reduce the price for setting up a solo validator to $3,683 at today's price.
This was a really interesting reply, thanks. I'd leave a longer response, but honestly I really need to be asleep right now.
I will say though, even today the barrier for entry is lower than that for bitcoin mining. You can definitely get started for $1000. I wouldn't really recommend Bitcoin mining as a hobby at this point, but that's basically the low end for a single machine.
Personally, that's about as much as I ever spent on mining equipment, and it was fun, I learned a lot, and it was even lucrative in the end.
No problem. It's past my bedtime too, but I'm really pleased that I'm able to discuss this stuff and I'm not getting downvotes or called a shill simply for providing information. It's always been a big area of fascination for me, the technology is really neat. :)
Sure, you could set up something that can process blocks. But there's no way you'd be able to make a profit with something that small. One of the fundamental tenets of cryptocurrency is that it doesn't rely on anyone acting altruistically, it assumes that everyone involved is in it for the money. It leverages greed to ensure that everyone "follows the rules", by making it so that if you break those rules you make less money. So I wouldn't consider a blockchain to be secure if it depended on miners who mined at a loss out of the goodness of their hearts. When people worry about centralization they overlook that Bitcoin has economies of scale that massively favors the bigger mining operations, the dollars-per-hash are much lower for the warehouses full of ASICs next door to a power plant than for the guy with a graphics card in a closet at home.
I did also mention that you could get involved in staking on Ethereum for much less than $120,000, at the cost of depending on third parties to handle the actual validation. You can do that either through staking pools or liquid staking. Essentially, you own a "share" of a single validator's stake and get a proportionate portion of the validator's rewards, minus a fee that the validator charges for actually running the validator.
That's not true if your home electricity cost is low. You will be still making a profit. Last I checked hardware pays for itself after a year if your electricity is very cheap. Then it's very slow profit and then it gets too old to make a profit.
With very cheap electricity you can expect 2x return after a few years and then it becomes garbage when the difficulty is too high
You can easily mine from home in a country like China that has $0.08 per kwh energy cost. Not everyone lives in California