Cryptography means cryptocurrency because that's what virtually every cryptographer was trying to achieve: cryptographically-secured interactions between people.
And economic interactions are the most impactful ones. Note that (Open)SSL was created when people really wanted to make CC payments over the internet.
Also: a lot of cryptographic protocols require some censorship-resistant publication medium. Wanna rotate keys and retire old ones? You need some sort of distributed transparency log. Want a human-readable name that escapes Zooko's triangle? Also need a log. These things did not exist until people got used to blockchains. Even CT log for TLS arrived only after Bitcoin, even though it does not require no mining or currency.
> And economic interactions are the most impactful ones.
Can you clarify that (I don't have anything for or against cryptocurrencies at the moment, now that the biggest scams exploded I'm neutral). Do you mean economic relationships are more important than other relationships?
If you bother to secure something, that is a high correlation with that which is impactful.
Some communications that fail, or leak, have less impact than others. In one case, we misunderstand each other about what's for dinner tonight. In another case, I lose my house.
Next, they said 'the most', so, I'm willing to bet that if you could tally up all communications and categorize those that are impactful (worth securing for more than just default principle reasons), and all that are economic, the overlap would be larger than not. Just an impression, could be wrong, but I'm pretty comfortable it's not a wildly mistaken one and reasonable to operate on that assumption.
And economic interactions are the most impactful ones. Note that (Open)SSL was created when people really wanted to make CC payments over the internet.
Also: a lot of cryptographic protocols require some censorship-resistant publication medium. Wanna rotate keys and retire old ones? You need some sort of distributed transparency log. Want a human-readable name that escapes Zooko's triangle? Also need a log. These things did not exist until people got used to blockchains. Even CT log for TLS arrived only after Bitcoin, even though it does not require no mining or currency.