Would you have said the same about Paypal? Because if you did, you'd have been wrong. Plus, among the set of technologies/companies that are discussed on HN, not that many are directly related to the goals you mentioned.
Perhaps Bitcoin is wasteful due to its Proof-of-Work system but you have to consider how wasteful the alternative is. How much human capital is wasted in operating the deposit banking and payments industry? How much land and resources are wasted to physically secure cash in bank vaults and move it around? How much efficiency is lost to high transaction fees or lack of access to the banking system? How many services which haven't yet been invented would be enabled by a distributed ledger? I'm not saying Bitcoin would wipe out those industries completely but it could certainly make parts of them obsolete.
I think it's wrong to dismiss the technology just because you dislike its community. The web was once a wild west as well.
The technology never matters as much as the community! The Internet was created by nerds, not speculators!
IMO, every contribution to economy is a contribution to the future.
And (at least up to now) the market has the opinion that your "being wasteful in terms of resources" is still of some economic value, otherwise the price would be far lower (~ zero)
I think that's taking a short view of things. There is no way to know who or what will be enabled by access to a powerful monetary instrument where financial tools are absent or severely handicapped (heavy inflation).
If that's the standard a new technology has to be at in order to interest you, well, forget about it, man.