The original Bitcoin whitepaper from Satoshi Nakamoto is available here: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

It is titled "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System"

So, based just on the title, it's pretty clear that it's original intent was as an electronic payment method.

The first sentence of the abstract is: "A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution"

If you read the rest of the whitepaper it's pretty clear that the original intent was as a mechanism to facilitate payments and transactions.