But the price you pay for removing those middle men is forcing the network to perform a truly astounding amount of computational work to verify the same transac

But the price you pay for removing those middle men is forcing the network to perform a truly astounding amount of computational work to verify the same transactions. There's an efficiency trade-off here, and I think for at least many of the older crypto currencies, the amount of work to process transactions is literally unsustainable without some additional tech or service layer. Which often leads us right back to clearly inefficient transaction costs.