It's not the ASIC that controls the wallet, it's the controller setup the ASIC is connected to - for an insane amount of overprice.
For virtually any other normal miner I would completely agree with you. My comment wasn't made out of random ignorance. I would swear that I read that the 21 Inc ASIC has a wallet address buried in the logic. I don't understand why, though it may all be wrapped up in some DRM scheme unique to them.
I don't think there is any reason to consider this a "normal SHA-256" mining engine. 21 Inc. doesn't sell miners in the usual sense, and hence to think we can apply our experience from others (e.g. Bitmain Avalon, BFL, etc.) is probably not right.
As I said before, if you buy into their overall scheme that's great. If not, it's probably best to move and not speculate too much on what, how, and why they did what they did. While the speculation might be fun, it's a bit pointless in my opinion.
One interesting question: Have -ck or Kano been contacted by 21 Inc? Can they say so if they have?
I still think they just wanted to tell investors they had a product. So they made a massively overpriced product they can sell and they know sales will be low. So they could make 1 batch of these and it would last a LONG time.
Now when they go to investor ... yes we have a product launched. Even though most of us agree what they have is not much of a miner at all.
