No, by buying some cryptocurrency you're not investing in the company behind the tech (if there even is one) at all.

If the currency does well but the company does badly, you still win. If the currency does badly but the company does well, you still lose.

You're exposed to the fluctuations of the currency, and completely unexposed to the valuation of the company.

Sure, there's that aspect. But the angle here is that they can take some of the capital transferred to them via crypto currency purchases to then use to directly invest in, and one thinks that by doing so they could well choose to invest in the ventures or areas that might increase the likelihood of the potential success of the currency. Which theoretically goes back to you.

I'm not trying to sugar-coat or rationalize the mania, only trying to explore the idea that this is both and neither gambling and investing.

I think people object to the idea that money used to purchase crypto currency in the first place is capital.

It depends on the currency in question, but for most of them, specifically no: they aren't "issued" by the company in question or even really related to them in any way. They're only in a position to gain from a coin purchase if they happen to have done the mining themselves (which they generally don't). All these ICOs are just blockchains branded by a certain company.

I woould like people to start using the word 'currencies' because they are not.

Following Investopedia 'Currency is a generally accepted form of money, including coins and paper notes, which is issued by a government and circulated within an economy. Used as a medium of exchange for goods and services, currency is the basis for trade.'

crypto is not generally accepted form of money; not issued by a government; circulated within economy - somehow yes.

So they don't fulfill all the requirements.

I feel like the first two aspects - "generally accepted, issued by a government" are unnecessary. If someone will take it as a medium for exchange, then that's currency to me.

I always thought of it as "otherwise value-less representation of value." All the currency I can think of fits this definition - including gold! Gold is only really valuable recently for circuits and the like.

Point taken. However, another important aspect is that currencies around the wolrd fulfill the same functions whereas when it comes to crypto - each token will represent anything that the creator intended it to be PLUS what the community uses it for (e.g. store of value). And each token will have a different 'design', different functions - from being tokens to enter the platform (e.g. Ethereuem itself) to tokens representing fractual ownership in assets (e.g. Maecenas art tokens or our RAT tokens representing a rat mascot, more about it here: https://medium.com/@katdum/what-did-i-learn-from-tokenizing-...). So there will be coins that will be fulfilling the descirption of a currency (apart from the government requirement) but there will be only a few ones compared to the vast amount of tokens with different functions.