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Comment by fezfight | Hacker News Reader

How so? I legitimately don't understand. With BTC, it's the same for everyone. Everyone can run a node. No ones node is special. Best wealth can do is buy miners to mine more coins. But that doesnt grant you more power, just more wealth. In PoS ETH, you need 32 Eth to participate. Thats 50k USD just to participate in validation.

BTC is free and you don't need any money to run a node. For ETH, you need 50k USD to do the same thing, no?

Genuinely curious here.

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If you don’t run an ASIC, your hash rate is so minuscule that it won’t matter (in the case of BTC).

Cost of an ASIC is around the same ballpark if not more.

That's just for mining, though. I can be part of the validation/consensus process for the BTC blockchain by running a node which you can run on anything with a 500gb hard drive. People use Pi's to do it. You need zero bitcoin to run a node. This is the difference.

You can still run a node on ethereum for free? You aren't required to be a validator to run a node?

Yes, but power in ETH PoS comes from the validation/staking. It's value comes from the validators consensus, no? Which you cant do without money. Or am I wrong? I'm trying to decide if I should get on board or not. If this isnt true, what is the point of staking?

You're not understanding how ETH works. You can run a node for free, just like you can in BTC. In either case you aren't contributing to consensus, just the propagation of network information. IF you want to contribute to BTC consensus meaningfully you need some extremely expensive specialized hardware and power to run it. If you want to contribute to ETH you need a big pile of money. It's the same thing, just with extra steps in the case of BTC. Unfortunately in BTC those extra steps also consume enormous amounts of energy, which has a real-world environmental cost. There's basically no reason as far as I can tell to prefer requiring people to buy ASICs over requiring people stake money. In either case the people with the resources control the system, but at least in the case of ETH you can turn your staked ETH into the same amount of ETH you had before. Good luck reselling those ASICs for anything close to what they sell for.

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