Rob from Gliph here. Gliph is a Bitcoin company from Boost VC Class 2. Tim Draper led our angel round (with Pantera) and is a mentor to Gliph.
Tim has been excited about Bitcoin and its potential for some time. Well in advance of other VCs, Tim was talking about its potential, particularly with regard to "competitive governance."
He starts describing solutions for competitive governance around 28:05. At 29:10 he brings up Bitcoin. I believe this was the first time he spoke about Bitcoin publicly but may be wrong. He states in the video:
"[bitcoin is] the most valuable currency now on the planet because it is under no one's control. It is out of people's control. It is no longer regulated by any government. They can't print Bitcoin."
The developers and miners are, in effect, the government of bitcoin. The developers act like the federal reserve, in that they can change the code to raise the max amount of bitcoin, increase the mining difficulty, etc. just as the Federal reserve would conduct open market operations or set interest rates to target inflation. So it's completely wrong to say that Bitcoin is "under no one's control". [0]
The key difference is that a majority of the miners have to accept the developer's changes and run the new client. The average US citizen cannot refuse interest rate hikes. So it's a transfer of power away from the few and corrupt (Fed + banks) to the few who are limited in their ability to be corrupt (developers + mining pools).
If the developers implement a terrible policy, the miners will refuse to update their clients to avoid devaluing the currency they are working hard to generate. So the power distribution and incentive structure are different. Whether thats a good or bad thing remains to be seen.
I think a problem in your analysis is that the miners are the equivalent of the Fed, not the developers. The developers are technical experts on whom the miners rely for tools, but are not the equivalent of the substantive decision makers.
But the bigger problem, whether you view miners or miners+developers as parallel to the Fed, is that you've failed present any argument or evidence supporting your key point, to wit, that the "few" who form the "government of bitcoin" (by your description) are somehow inherently "limited in their ability to be corrupt".
The Fed makes the rules. The banks/people perform the actions under those rules that create economic activity in the US.
The Developers make the rules. The miners perform the actions under those rules that create economic activity in the Bitcoin markets.
Say the Fed is corrupt/stupid and enacts a bad policy. The banks/people have no choice but to accept the decision of the Fed. Theoretically you could emigrate, but that is neither desirable nor feasible for the majority of the population.
Say the developers are corrupt/stupid and decide to raise the Bitcoin cap to 30 billion and lower the difficulty, effectively hyperinflating the currency. The mining community has the choice to either a) not accept the changes to the client or b) to vote with their digital feet by moving to another cryptocurrency. They are more likely to choose a) assuming they've been mining for a while/have a reserve of Bitcoin.
The key is that the miners "rely [on the developers] for tools" as you put it. The tools = the client = the rules of the game. So the developers make the rules and the miners decide whether or not to play by them.
They can change the code, but they can't force anyone to adopt the new version. Ultimately, it's the majority of the people running full nodes in the network who are in control, and if they reject a change made by the developers and refuse to upgrade, or even go with a fork, then that's where bitcoin goes.
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.
