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.
Mining apparatus are now so expensive due to the difficulty risen up got by the crypto's but if you consider to risk with the latest GPU's and other things then maybe you will gain more money with that since you could stake the coins that you mine. But apparently not all people can afford to buy high end GPU's so rather I think many of them would prefer to choose the staking.