1) New investors demanding a finite supply of bitcoins are increasing the exchange rate of bitcoins/dollar.
2) Early holders of large volumes of bitcoins can therefore cash in their bitcoins for a great deal of real money from new investors desiring to enter the market.
ergo, money shifts from new investors to the creators. (If the creators are smart enough to cash out. Which it seems they are, as Satoshi has disappeared. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satoshi_Nakamoto)
In a pyramid scheme the wealth always flows up to the creator of the scheme, but the creators of Bitcoin can only make money by selling their own bitcoins - they don't get a cut when anybody else does.
Please explain how new investors obtain bitcoins, if not from the original members of the system (some of the early users have 1% of the total bitcoins, I recall hearing). Yes, there's mining, but that's not an effective way to transform money into bitcoins - I mean, say that I wanted 1000 bitcoins. Building an expensive new computer to mine and waiting for them to magically appear is not how I would go about it.
However, the people responsible for creating the bitcoin protocol only benefit financially if they sell their own bitcoins, or if an increase in demand raises the price bitcoins are trading at.
The Bitcoin economy is a free market; people can buy and sell bitcoins and will, and any profits they might make are entirely governed by supply and demand.
It's kinda sad. I think when it happens I'll make like edw519 and self-publish a book "The Best Of Hugh3" in which I publish all my "told you so" comments. And hey, maybe just to be charitable I'll sell copies for a million bitcoins each!