[idiotsecant]

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.