In the end state (after ~2140), mining rewards just come from TX fees. But true, it is possible you could just redistribute TX fees to stakers.

Post-merge ethereum is designed so that the gas fees and the staking rewards roughly cancel out on balance (so overall inflation is around zero), but they are decoupled so even if nobody is using the network you still get a staking yield

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eurleif 4 days ago | parent [-]

>so overall inflation is around zero

Pedantic point: monetary inflation is around zero, not necessarily price inflation (which is what people typically mean when they just say "inflation").

	▲	ifwinterco 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Yes sorry, important clarification. In theory if the entire world was on an ethereum standard with a steady state population, price inflation would also average out to zero