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?

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'.