We've been reducing middlemen to few, not to zero. e.g. Amazon, Whatsapp, Facebook, Airbnb etc. Hell, even peer-to-peer systems have some kind of middlemen. If

We've been reducing middlemen to few, not to zero. e.g. Amazon, Whatsapp, Facebook, Airbnb etc. Hell, even peer-to-peer systems have some kind of middlemen. If that middleman is in a big enough market with low barriers to entry and lots of competition, and is able to drive cost down with smart tech, it doesn't really matter to most users whether he exists or not. Decentralised systems never promised low transaction costs. A private party running a database can do it cheaper and faster than a set of decentralised actors working for some incentive to establish the same database. That seems pretty much inevitable. They did promise something else. Trustless-systems. But it hasn't been shown yet that consumers value this. (e.g. see our most valued companies like Facebook to which we routinely trust data (from secrets to nudes) we'd never, ever share with anyone else) Blockchain's value proposition, as I've always interpreted it, isn't 'material' in the sense that transaction costs or speed are, but more based on the culture and the relationships of the 'value network'. i.e., the relationships aren't based on trust+laws, but on code+math. And it doesn't appear to me that the market values these relationships/culture, but it seems that the market does value the material aspects. hence there being no real blockchain users of blockchain applications. (except for the whole store of value thing, which drives basically all the price changes, but nobody envisioned the blockchain to solely be digital gold and nothing else).