Maybe people are defining waste differently (equating "high cost" with waste).

What you may call waste is in a way the cost of the operation of the network (and its properties and guarantees and so on).

Waste suggests that there is an easy, equivalent, much more efficient solution around the corner but no one cares and wastes resources instead when they could have been doing the same thing with fewer resources.

Welcome to Bitcoin advocate logic. Clearly using more energy than a moderate sized european country in order to process 3 or 4 transactions per second isn't wasteful. Right?

I mean in absolute numbers, says the bitcoin advocate, the fiat banking system has to use more, right?....

....nevermind the fact they do something that is not driven by pure speculation and do it at thousands of times larger scales.

Bitcoin -- the perfect intersection of people who don't understand finance, economics, computer science, scaling, politics, socio-economics, or math.

PS: People only quote Bitcoin's energy use and often times they leave out things like air conditioning. Nobody seems to sum up the total energy required to power the entirety of the crypto "space" including Ethereum, Litecoin, etc.

Waste is something that is unnecessary. Competing for PoW solution is critical. There is no waste. If you know a different way of solving the consensus problem, tell us.