This is an absurd definition of cryptography. Are you going to say that zero-knowlege proofs are not cryptography? Are pedersen commitments not cryptography? Ar

This is an absurd definition of cryptography. Are you going to say that zero-knowlege proofs are not cryptography? Are pedersen commitments not cryptography? Are ring signatures not cryptography (they use symmetric cryptography internally)? Asymmetric key cryptography is all the same thing. Digital signatures are cryptography. The "secret" being obscured cryptographicially is the information needed to produce a verifiable message. Your definition of cryptography might make sense to someone more than a century ago, but the state of the art has advanced greatly since then. The reason why you define cryptography like this, is I think political. For example, I am not sure you would extend the same logic to cryptographic voting schemes. Cryptocurrency is just another application of cryptography to solve coordination problems.