I'm confused as to why anyone would invest in Bitcoin companies as opposed to Bitcoins directly. The impression I got was that investing in companies provided added risks (co-founder separation, business failure, legal risks), without providing a significant advantage (risk mitigation, upside multiplication) over just buying Bitcoins directly.
The distinction is subtle, but important. Let's say, for example, that I have no real idea what the price of bitcoin should be in five years -- but I am confident that enthusiasm for, and interest in, bitcoin buying and trading will grow dramatically all the while. I'd rather own the company processing the transactions than the bitcoin itself. The bitcoin might soar, and it might tank, and it might do both of those things in a mostly unpredictable, haphazard fashion. (As has been happening.) But the companies trading bitcoin don't necessarily need to buy and hold. They can make money off of transaction volume, or off of leverage against their bitcoin assets, or off of any number of things only tangentially affected by the nominal value of bitcoin.
This is sort of like the old saying about how to make money in a gold rush. You don't mine for gold; you sell picks and shovels.
There are scenarios in which the Bitcoin "sector" grows without the value of Bitcoins themselves appreciating significantly (or at least, to the same extent). For example it could become a common medium of exchange but an uncommon medium to hold, if a large portion of the growth is in Bitcoin exchange platforms that convert payments immediately to national currencies, like BitPay. In such a situation there could be a large volume of business going through companies like BitPay, but with only transient demand for the coins themselves.
Without the infrastructure to support bitcoins, the value bitcoins will remain stagnate or may even go down. Investing in companies to build out infrastructure for this currency is only "sure" bet you can take unless you gamble on someone else to make the investment.
Bitcoin companies may quickly move to focus on properties of the blockchain that are not related (and, perhaps more importantly, more profitable), than the bitcoin currency.
Also, importantly, bitcoins may be extraordinarily profitable for a bitcoin company, but never increase in value, whereas if you purchased a bitcoin today for $700, and 5 years from now, the bitcoin was still $700, you would likely be unhappy.
The consensus based global ledger of script based transactions. Bitcoin currency is just one application of such a system. Others, such as Contracts, Escrow, Title Assignment have been proposed as well - and the transaction fees of such might be much more profitable than simply identifying a input/output of a bitcoin transaction.
Cashflow. The company can sell a service and have perpetual income. If bitcoin losses value, you are still generating income, as opposed to having your money invested directly in the currency.
