Come on, I'm sure that before bitcoin was invented, no one used the term "crypto" to refer to "cryptography"; doing that would be more cringy than this article itself.
And libgcrypt in 2000: https://github.com/gpg/libgcrypt/commit/bf2fc9201cfa96cd70ef...
Totally normal and not cringy at all.
Edit: And on Usenet in 1982: https://www.usenetarchives.com/view.php?id=net.misc&mid=dGVr...
Here's a conference from 1981 put on by the IEEE:
And yet you are wrong :)
I have to assume this is sarcasm, right?
That's literally what "crypto" has always meant for decades, cryptography.
The Crypto conference started in 1981 for instance.