Ethereum operates under a permissionless proof-of-stake model, it has not been mineable since the Merge in 2022.
There are obviously large staking pools (including decentralized pools), but there is also a substantial community of people who stake from home on a validating node of their own. A good example is the EthStaker community on Reddit [1].
The compute and bandwidth requirements are very permissible (quad-core CPU, 16-32 GB memory, 2-4 TB SSD, 20/20 Mb/s), and the theoretical size of minimum stake has gone down substantially over time due to Rocket Pool [2].
The minimum staking amount is very close to zero. Of course, directly participating in consensus by having the opportunity of building blocks requires 32 ETH (≈$75k), or 16/8 ETH ($37k/$18k) if you run a pool for other people through e.g. the trustless Rocket Pool system.
The minimum cost to acquire an ASIC so that you can even _contribute_ to the consensus is very high (thousands), and to be profitable you have to have close to free electricity. The ironic thing is, that in PoW the "rich get richer" is abstracted away into a combination of economies of scale, and access to free/very cheap power. Plus all the e-waste and wasted power, whereas PoS runs on e-waste people run in their closet, pulling as little as sub-10 watts.
"Actual transaction costs are estimated around 0.001 cent/tx (at high transaction rates, amortized over billions of transactions, excluding migration costs). Note that this is an early estimate -- and could thus easily be 10x higher." [1]
Transactions costing singular cents [2], and very soon fractions of a cent [3], are already doable on public rollups providing actual control of your own funds, with escape hatches in case the system sequencer falls over [4]. These are, of course, still under heavy development. If privacy is a requirement, there's a zk-rollup for that (or, just use Monero). Not to mention support for social recovery.
This is a very PoS-Ethereum-centric (and L2-scaling-centric) view. There are even cheaper chains that trade L1 decentralization for faster blocktimes, instant finality, and/or much cheaper fees.
Ethereum's clients (execution and consensus) are only really concerned about a sufficiently fast SSD, more specifically in terms of random IO. Any mid-tier SSD should work though: stick it to a Raspberry Pi (or a Rock 5B) and you'll be validating on a low-power arm board. Or grab a used micro-PC/NUC, as most people running home nodes do.
I do overnight oats; in the morning, all you have to do is pop the lid.
* Wholegrain oats (1.5 to 2 dl)
* Greek yogurt (1.5 to 2 dl)
* Milk, skimmed/whole (3 dl)
Then, throw in whatever. A sliced banana or berries, honey, a pinch of vanilla extract. Prep it in the evening, chuck it into the fridge, and it's done in the morning.
Mev-boost, a piece of software that consensus clients delegate their block building to, is currently being used on mainnet. The difference is that there can be multiple block builder _relays_, such as Flashbots, bloXroute, Manifold Finance, and Blocknative.
These relays effectively accept bundles from MEV searchers, which are then sent to the validator running mev-boost as they propose their block.
There are obviously large staking pools (including decentralized pools), but there is also a substantial community of people who stake from home on a validating node of their own. A good example is the EthStaker community on Reddit [1].
The compute and bandwidth requirements are very permissible (quad-core CPU, 16-32 GB memory, 2-4 TB SSD, 20/20 Mb/s), and the theoretical size of minimum stake has gone down substantially over time due to Rocket Pool [2].
[1] https://reddit.com/r/ethstaker/
[2] https://rocketpool.net/node-staking/rocket-pool-vs-solo-stak...