Which do people prefer? Staking/Masternodes or mining?
Staking is more profitable & affordable, as in mining you have to buy expensive GPU or antminer, due to a high demand for GPU cards nowadays the price of GPU's are touching to the sky. Also, mining requires high electricity consumption & computational power to mine, and as a result, you have to pay high electricity bill & profit will be very less, so mining is not profitable as it was before. Staking your coins in a wallet or running a master is a good choice as you just need a laptop with an internet connection & just hold your coins in wallet & you will be getting 5~15% dividend annually depending on the type of POS based coin & amount of coins you are holding.
Aside from high costs and electric consumption. Mining is more complicated than staking. Mining needs a lot of knowledge in setting up the mining apparatus. Staking needs only to hold your coins. But there are only coins that be a staking. There is a possibility that you can earn a lot in staking because mining was already the source of income by many people. There are lots of miners right now and the competition is very tight.