Thinking of the bitcoin network "wasting" money as a "feature" (rather than incidentally) to process transactions is not quite the right way to think about it.

Thinking of the bitcoin network "wasting" money as a "feature" (rather than incidentally) to process transactions is not quite the right way to think about it. From a bird's-eye-view the current baking/financial system of transactions (banks+visa+federal reserve, mints, FINCEN, etc.) all are part of what makes it difficult to cheat with money like USD. Rather than use this huge network of organizations to make it difficult to cheat, bitcoin uses proof-of-work. Replacing all those big, expensive organizations is, well, expensive! I believe bitcoin (or technologies like it) have the potential to be more efficient at this than the current system; bitcoin just makes more explicit the cost of making it expensive to cheat.