It was so satisfying to drift around the corners of Liberty City. I loved driving on GTA IV

Not really to be honest, the power is in the decentralization, permissionless and opensource nature of the system. You can’t get that out of the traditional system

Of course not all networks are the same and there are always shit ones out there that compromise on those tenets, but if you do your due dilligence, you will see there is value in some of them

No, not really, you can start staking with as many as you want, see pooled staking: https://ethereum.org/en/staking/pools/

Staking pools are a collaborative approach to allow many with smaller amounts of ETH to obtain the 32 ETH required to activate a set of validator keys

You earn rewards proportional to the amount you stake

You only need 32 ETH to stake if you want to solo stake / home stake and you don’t pool resources with anyone else, see https://ethereum.org/en/staking/solo/

Bitcoin switched to industrial ASICs a long time ago, and Ethereum has completely moved away from proof-of-work mining in 2022, see: https://ethereum.org/en/roadmap/merge/

The Merge was executed on September 15, 2022. This completed Ethereum’s transition to proof-of-stake consensus, officially deprecating proof-of-work and reducing energy consumption by ~99.95%.

GPU mining is pretty much completely dead because after Ethereum switched the yields on everything else tanked, no one mines with GPUs anymore, at least not for any major blockchain. GPUs are mainly being used with AI now