I understand the trade off a little better now. Thanks. It leads me to a follow up question - is this universally true of all blockchain implementations or is it due to the structure of cryptocurrency (mining, etc.)?

Mining is part of how the Blockchain remains decentralized; you can't remove it.

In the original paper, the way mining worked was by Proof-of-Work (PoW), which wastes a bunch of energy to make sure it's unprofitable to attack it.

There is research into mining without wasting energy by using alternatives to PoW, like Proof-of-Stake (PoS). I don't think there's consensus about whether any of them actually work.