I would say that is the new narrative for Bitcoin. As you can read in the Whitepaper, it started out as
"Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System",
Although they also argue the proof of work is similar to gold mining it appears not to have been its main objective:
“The steady addition of a constant of amount of new coins is analogous to gold miners expending resources to add gold to circulation”
Arguably Bitcoin failed to become the digital cash its creators intended it to be and instead became another asset class [See this post]. Also note that what they describe “the steady addition of a constant amount of new coins is analogous to gold” actually fits the constant block reward of Grin and not Bitcoins decreasing block reward. It is little things like these discrepancies that reveal there were multiple minds involved in creating Bitcoin as a whole.
It is always humbling to look at the long history of digital-cash systems, Bitcoin and grin are just steps in the continuous process of exploration and improvement: