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Not at all the same thing. When you invest in a high risk startup you are looking for a return of 3-10 times your money in a roughly 5-8 year time period with a high risk of the business failing and losing all of it. With coins you generally don't have the same upside potential or the same downside risk over a similar time period. Coins are not a good investment vehicle. First, the costs of buying and selling are too high. Second, the historical returns taking into account those costs are simply not there. When you are paying around 20% commissions on both ends (at auction) or paying the profit a dealer wants then that is eating your profit. Of course you can make money on coins. But it really requires a collector's knowledge (rather than an investor's knowledge) to take advantage of undervalued pieces and to get a level of undervalue that compensates for buy/sell commission is rare. Third, coins don't pay a dividend (like many shares) and you cannot live in them like houses. So there are no compensating benefits while you hold them.

You also have to bear in mind that the article quotes Gibbons when relating what the market is doing. Gibbons and Baldwins have been pushing coins as investments for a few years now, but that isn't the same as a neutral expressing an opinion. What do they use as the criteria for deciding where prices have gone? If they use their own FPL then prices are doubling with every issue. As with all statistics, it would be good if you knew the conditions under which the data was sampled.