You may have to read between the lines on some of this stuff due to regulations. If the team makes a blog post that clearly spells it out: "ICN tokens have value because all of the profit we generate will always be used to buy/burn ICN" then they would be admitting a violation of the Howey test:
2) There is an expectation of profits from the investment
And no, it's not a share of a company. There's no legal framework to allow an anonymous token holder to have the same rights as a stock shareholder. Again, can figure this out by reading between the lines.
Buying back the tokens with the earned profits means NOTHING if the tokens have no actual worth. It's like an empty gesture. They're using a portion of the profits earned from investors' money, to buy back the tokens which THEY issued to investors. The rest of the profits remain in the fund.
As they have stated they will buy ICN back below the highest bid, and below the last price - and state clearly that they don't want to artificially increase the market value (which is fine) - then the buybacks won't affect the market at that point. Any support "wall" is irrelevant, as it has always been, when other whales are in the game.
As the token has no intrinsic value, and Iconomi aren't artificially increasing its value during buybacks, then the only factor worth considering is supply reduction... which, as I said, is not enough to increase value alone.
You are still left with a token of NO VALUE which is slowly decreasing in supply.
It doesn't matter how much ICN they buy back with their profits, the remaining ICN is worthless without a use-case, and the market will ultimately reflect that, because Iconomi aren't in control of the market.
The only other driving factor here is that enough people erroneously believe that this model actually works, and somehow this collective misconception will drive the price up. But that has already been dis-proven, as the price has dropped after the announcement - which wouldn't be possible if people actually believed this "deflation" hype.
In reality, you could reduce the supply to ONE ICN, and that single ICN will still have ZERO actual value, unless somebody from the team can explain otherwise (e.g. rights/perks/whatever)
So don't bother with this "read between the lines" nonsense. Until somebody from the team can explain away the above, people will keep criticising this move, for those reasons I've explained.
Is this making any sense yet? Because it was glaringly obvious to me as soon as I read the announcement, and it seems to be glaringly obvious to those "trolls" on reddit, too.
Anyone can make a token on Ethereum. If I create 100 MEND tokens right now, in return for tokens of established value, then I invest those value tokens elsewhere, turn a profit, and start to buy my MEND back with 20% of my profits, would you accept that as a legitimate business model?! I doubt it.
It's like I borrow a dollar to place a 5 to 1 bet, I win, then give the dollar back. But I keep 4 dollars for myself.
This whole thing is a joke until somebody from Iconomi can explain why ICN is actually worth anything.
Hint: You are not someone from Iconomi, so please encourage Tim or Jani to address those concerns. Preferably Tim, as Jani appears to be a halfwit.