Diamond age had a distributed tuple space, which was kind of similar in effect, enclaves that made their living off of work their computers did for digital pay.
Of course, the standout thing about cryptocoin by comparison is that there's no real useful work resulting from all the absurd amounts of electricity being used to mine it.
They have some utility, if you're willing to ignore the majority use case (get-rich-quick schemes), but ultimately, they're like decorating by hanging pictures on quadcopters instead of nailing them to the wall. The pictures are technically hanged, but it's kind of a dumb use of energy.