There is zero waste. You don’t understand bitcoin. Bitcoin is not about transaction efficiency or throughput, use MySQL for that. Bitcoin is about secure owners

There is zero waste. You don’t understand bitcoin. Bitcoin is not about transaction efficiency or throughput, use MySQL for that. Bitcoin is about secure ownership of money, peer to peer exchange and immutable fiscal policy. What you call waste is simply price for some level of security that isn’t backed by any armies. Edit: also, no, miners aren't middlemen, that's just another misunderstanding on your part. middleman has control over the process they facilitate, miners have no control over anything but construction of blocks and how much energy they are willing to spend. you could argue miners can choose to ignore transactions coming from me (if they manage to figure out how to identify them), but it's a competition of independent parties so there will always be other miners that do not choose to ignore me. for that to be an issue big enough to call miners middlemen you'd need majority of miners to collude on something quite obvious and demonstrable, which would undermine bitcoin project itself, rendering miners' own investments in bitcoin and infrastructure worthless - not in their interest. besides, with confidential transactions this entire point will be moot.