For sure a bot, right?

Here is an video from Milton Friedman talking about a monetary system on Internet. I feel like this could be a sort of inspiration to Bitcoin creator.

https://youtu.be/DPzNArH8lFM

Considering that the Internet was a US government funded "invention" to be used by the US military and both of these organizations crave centralization and full control and they worship the Dollar, what you suggest sounds very unlikely because creating another currency for the internet goes against the "dollar dominance" that US regime dreams of.

The developers of ARPANET, the precursor to the internet, varied in philosophies, with "free give and take" being a common one, which does not involve money. And on the other end of the spectrum is BACS, the Bankers' Automated Clearing System, which you no doubt have used many times and which began in the 1960s during this age of ARPANET.

The sub-cultures that you may be looking for may not have been recorded well, but here are some references that gives thoughts contemporaneous to your desired time-period. David Chaum's 1983 paper is usually regarded as the first digital currency, although I'm not sure that is true.

Diebold, J. (1967, December). When money grows in computers. Columbia Journal of World Business, pp. 39-46

Reistad DL (1967) The coming cashless society: Implications and benefits of pending system. Business Horizons 10(3): 23–32

Bacard, A. (1994, January). A cashfree society: Nirvana or nightmare? The Humanist, pp. 41-42

Bátiz-Lazo, Bernardo, Thomas Haigh, and David L. Stearns. "Origins of the Modern Concept of a Cashless Society, 1950s–1970s." The Book of Payments. Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2016. 95-106.

Lauer, J. (2020). Plastic surveillance: Payment cards and the history of transactional data, 1888 to present. Big Data & Society, 7(1), 2053951720907632.

The Internet doesn't have a single inventor or a group of inventors, the Internet as we know it is a product of gradual improvement of computer networks that was going on for almost as long as computers themselves. And it kinda doesn't matter what the inventors believed in, because it was simply a practical task - establishing communication between machines here and now. They didn't have some grand picture of the future, perhaps they didn't even know just how important the Internet will become.

I think this might be what you have seen::

"The HTTP 402 Payment Required is a nonstandard response status code that is reserved for future use. This status code was created to enable digital cash or (micro) payment systems and would indicate that the requested content is not available until the client makes a payment."

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/402

Can't find where the original source is but it might be from the W3C when HTTP protocols were getting standardised.

Edit : It's in the protocol W3C released in 1997, so not really the early internet even if it was discussed for years first.

The issue with some things or situations in life is that some need to experience them or go through them in order to provide solutions. It is not easy to visualize and project situations that we do not understand if we do not experience them, it is not for everyone.

If you don't understand me, it happens with theoretical physicists, their formulas lead them to visualize things that they only understand when a formula guides them, after that it's light, it's easy, not before.

 They move on a different thought frequency.

Now, let's get to the point of the matter, You have you ever given a check. So, do you know that a check traveled from point A to point B offline, this as a simple example of how before some transactions were mobilized and in that process, the technology worked with punched cards, etc.

Then! There were many people visualizing in one way or another something similar to what we have today, but in your precarious perception of the situation you need to have accurate documentation of names...that perhaps does not exist today and that it is lost or relegated to oblivion... at least as collateral of the precise and well documented information that does exist.
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Read about these two characters, their contributions to the subject can be very specific. But they denote that concern for a solution like Bitcoin can be persistent in related areas, as well as in others that we would never expect to see.

Milton Friedman, visualize a idea that resembles we know today.

Richard Feynman, one of the greatest minds of the 20th century, I speak, mentions something very similar to the idea behind Bitcoin, not specifically about what we know today, but he mentions it, it is understood that he refers to a similar system.

So,  your search is extensive if you want to look beyond what is known by short reference or is the most formal and best documented.