What concerns me most though is the lack of sustainable business model.
How will devs and other needed development and marketing expenses be payed once the limited stash is gone?
I don't believe dependency on donations works well. Only a few donate and pay for the bills for all coinholders.
After a while conflicts arise and the model in the end is changed, as is happening to Bitcoin, Nxt, Bitshares and so many others.
Think Dash, Decred, ZCash have solved this problem well by having an unlimited inflation where a piece of it continues to go to the dev/marketing.
I don't understand why you say that you
don't believe dependency on donations works well and name Bitcoin as an example. It is the proof that a project can be successful without business model even though I do not recommend Byteball or any project to be like Bitcoin.
Conflicts are a consequence of success and high valuation, there are no conflict when a project has no value. See Tezos for example, one of the highest ICO ever and already a conflict before it's release. I think it will turn well for them because the class action is very likely to fail but in the meantime, Tezos enjoyed one of the highest buzz in all the ecosystem and became the most anticipated project.
However with a limited supply like Byteball I see only 2 solutions, break that agreement like Bitshares did and issue more coins, or abandon the project and build a new one with new tokes like Nxt did with Ardor, or much better and not tried yet to my knowledge, have a piece of the transaction fees go to a fund that pays for these things. A hard problem to solve. Curious in your opinion on this.
Interesting but I don't think it's a problem of busines model or funding at this point. In fact there is a business model to fund development since the start : 1% of all supply + 1% (forgot what was it for) + control over the undistributed supply which represent 35.5%. That is more than enough to fund almost anything.
From outside, the greatest Byteball innovation was, and I'm sorry for all the dev work, the airdrop distribution. It is still the biggest trend in crypto but it was too easy to copy for thousands of shitcoins that took all of Byteball network effect.
What about growing the team and partnerships ? Iota is spamming non-stop those weird new team members and partnerships between downtime, fatal flaws and emergency bug-fixes. They are so good at narrative that people keep cheering non-stop. It's all about the narrative, telling stories, sharing a vision.