With PoW you had capital expenditure, but also operational expenditure (e.g. electricity costs). Your capital also depreciates over time.
With PoS, you don't have any operational expenditure, and the sticker price of your capital expenditure stays the same, and you can get it back when you unstake.
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.
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.
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.
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.
PoW was worse because it had an economy of scale. For example, it is far cheaper to add mining power if you already own a big mining centre or buy ASICs in bulk.
PoS does not have this: your rewards are always linear to the amount of ETH you stake.
This means that, while PoS is still controlled by those with the most money, it does not trend to centralisation as harshly as PoW.
Pos is controlled by those with the most money, and they continuously gain more money through staking rewards (i.e. the rich control the system and automatically get richer).
With PoW, you have to sell/spend some of the coins you earn in order to pay for operation expenditures.
I don't see how it is beneficial to anyone (other than ASIC developers and energy companies) to build a tax paid to ASIC developers and energy companies into the protocol.
The energy expenditure anchors the money into the real world, making it a hard money like Gold, and it also facilitates decentralization.
Energy is naturally decentralized all over the world.
A "tax to energy companies" is a subsidy from the energy company's point of view. If you want more of something, subsidize it. A world with more energy is better than a world with less, as we're all in the process of relearning.
There is no evidence that the exchange value of any PoW coin has anything to do with the energy used to mint it. In fact we have counter evidence, for example that there are PoS coins that have value
That's the same in both cases. Both times you are turning money into more money. Literally the only difference is that in PoW you have external costs. But since these costs are physical and out of the scope of the chain, they do not scale linearly.
PoS is the same, except it doesn’t ALSO burn electricity that needs to be paid for by parts of the mining rewards.