Right now if Tony dies the project is over and out, so witnesses can still be centralised in Tony, as the project is still fully dependent on him anyway. Over time though it is indeed important that more people take on leadership roles so that the project can go on without him if necessary, and indeed witnesses become more decentralised as well.
True.
The cashback witness MEJ...
http://www.cashback-witness.com has already been adopted by many people (see:
https://byteball.fr/stats.php) but will never be a full replacment of Tony original JED....
True decentralization will come only when independant witnesses will be added in the default list by Tony. There is not sufficient attention/motivation from end users to the witnesses to make them change their default wallet parameters (actualy they just don't care...). Or in other words: thoses who are concerned will never be the majority.
Which brings me to the question: Why are the 12 default witnesses all controlled by Tony? Okay, the fees, I get that, but Tony already keeps 1 % of all bytes. Does he really need the transaction fees?
As far as I can see it, there are right now
13 operating witnesses. 1 is yours and 12 are Tony's.
In my opinion it would be a good counter arguement against the decentralization accusations, if your witness (and the next 4-5 upcoming witnesses) are listed in the default list.
Couldn't Tony make that happen right now? He still gets 11/12 of all fees at the moment.
When all is distributed, who will pay the bills?
A coin needs continuous development and marketing.
Paying these things from donations is not a business model.
You need a piece of the created coins to pay for this so that all coinholders pay their part of the bill.
Fully agree. There needs to be a dedicated reserve for marketing, UX & development in order to attract a larger community and to secure the future of Byteball.
Would it be possible that the
byteball community fund operates a witness? (Which becomes a part of the default witness list, too).
That way, the witnesses are more decentralized (a bit) and the community fund gets steady income based on the fees. They can hire devs or pay for marketing with that.
Ideas welcome! 
