I'm interested in more about the sustainability of this project: what's paying the bills now, and what's going to ensure the bills are payed in the future?
Bitcoin survived long enough to become within a reasonable approximation of self-sustaining... is Ethereum basically someone spending their early-adopter Bitcoin collection as runway?
We still have a substantial reserve of bitcoin and fiat currency, plus the pre-mined Ether which the Ethereum Foundation holds for further development. I can't speak on this officially, but Vitalik Buterin has mentioned it in the past https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/2zoawi/ethereum_f...
The ethereum foundation was given a sizeable endowment of ether currency to help advance development, as part of the launch. It will take 3-4 days before we'll have any idea of the market price of ether, and I won't speculate, but this will be a critical data point to answer your question.
My gut feeling is that the technology is sound, but it remains to be seen whether or not enough of a community grows to sustain things like the headcount behind the glitzy PR campaign.
I wish the Ethereum team great success in this endeavor; if nothing else it is uncharted territory!
We really do hope that there will be mass adoption, and that we can continue to build out Metropolis (a web-browser that extends the security of the block chain right the way through rich user apps) and Serenity (parallel supercomputer performance from blockchains.)
Bitcoin survived long enough to become within a reasonable approximation of self-sustaining... is Ethereum basically someone spending their early-adopter Bitcoin collection as runway?
Edit: found this blogpost - https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/03/14/ethereum-the-first-year...
My TL,DR: Ethereum development is under a non-profit initially 'VC-funded(-ish)' (with Bitcoin) vs. how Bitcoin itself was organically 'bootstrapped'.