To expand on what seems to be a generalisation of this problem: Any cryptocurrency sibling of bitcoin that relies on cryptographic mining as a basis will either have this problem or will result in (value of currency * inflation rate) additional resources wasted on computation each year.

I believe (tentatively) that the above is an unavoidable result of the cryptographic and micro-economic principles that such currencies rely on.

This is not limited to cryptocurrencies, e.g., gold-based currencies cause people to "waste resources" mining.