I'll try an analogy...
It's the early 1800s and hot air balloons are getting popular, and the possibilities of air transport begin to blow minds.... annnd you get a section of the theoretically "thinking" classes go apeshit about baskets, (gondolas) "yay, baskets, imagine what all you can put in the baskets, baskets is where it's at, corner the market in baskets!!!" and you ask if it isn't rather the portable high density liquid or gaseous fuels, the burners of same or the envelope materials that are maybe the most important, as the source of buoyancy, the means of leaving the ground, annnnd they'll be like "No, baskets! Look what you can put in them, we'll drag them around with horses..." ... and you'll be shaking your head and thinking they missed the point, things can be transported, but the medium of transport is the egg laying golden goose, not the damn egg carton.
I have a little trouble deciphering the analogy. To me Bitcoin (and by extension,
cryptocurrency, or crypto-something) is a network comprising of nodes that both
produce and maintain a record of their communication. It could be said that they
both compose and uphold a common reality on which they all agree. The consensus
record is organized as a linked list of proven work-units (the blockchain). The consensus
record can contain any kind of data. In Bitcoin the data are the records of transference
of value. But it could be easily be any other data, and the incentive to maintain it
would not necessarily have to be private profit, but could arise from the internal
needs of some organization for instance, and so the custom blockchain would be
restricted to that organization. I'm pretty sure various companies and organizations
are experimenting with this right now.