The proof of work in bitcoin was originally a cryptographic primitive designed to prevent email spam.

I would argue that pretty much all of the recent (past 5 years) advances in work on zkproofs is researched/funded/applied by cryptocurrency community. and imo this is the most important work in cryptography that is happening, actually developing secure general computation. You might not like cryptocurrencies but to dismiss this is silly.

The "crypto means cryptography" motto also trivializes all the prior work, cryptography and ideas of digital tokens/currencies have been tied together for decades.

https://zkp.science/ https://zkproof.org/ https://github.com/0xPARC https://github.com/iden3/circom