I feel opposite. Bitcoin is a proof-of-work scheme to come to an agreement on certain information. Due to the costs of work, any kind of PoW scheme will be used as commodity and traded. Also, people will tend to allocate all their "mining" resources towards most valuable protocol. Which will lead to a single most powerful blockchain while others will be in very tiny minority.

So if you want to create a PoW agreement scheme, you have to create a system of incentives, that is create a currency out of it. Which Bitcoin does. But currency is a secondary part. Primary part is agreement.