I support FPGA mining not cause I can jump early on it (I am a small scale miner and I can barely afford one $6k FPGA).
Heck, I could've even jumped on these ASICs. I knew about them and could've ordered in the first batches itself.
FPGAs are much more power efficient and may or may not be faster than a GPU (price to performance ratio).
People who own mining farms would be interested in getting 1k of these instead of 10k GPUs. In case of FPGAs there can always be some xyz person who can bring out custom implementations (binaries) which perform better than competitors. The cost involved is much lower than a competitor who has to compete against a giant and manufacture a better ASIC.
FPGA mfg are two (Xilinx and Intel/Altera) and they are not mining crypto with their FPGAs. They have a much larger customer base to meet their targets just like for NVIDIA/AMD crypto is not the bread and butter.
The problem with ASIC is one entity is producing, mining and selling them. It's not the ASIC itself but this particular entity.
If I was a money printing machine manufacturer and that's the only thing I do why or when should I sell it to others?
Yeah keep repeating SIA founder's words. Everyone have read that article. You blame bitmain but protect underground FPGA mining. Yeah no word on that. That's been going on for quite some time. What about their retail availabilty ? Are they available for sale as gpu are ? No, only big guys with big money will benefit from them. You must be blind as a bat if you can't see this as a small scale miner. They are more powerful and more scalable so farms will be even more powerful and efficient. Meanwhile they are available to only handful of people. Just have a look around. You are waiting for some guy on the internet who might deliver them to you. Some middle man. Power in the hands of only few here. What's stopping them from mining with those FPGA's before delivering them to you ? Meanwhile the big guy are already mining with them for more then year and the big guy who missed out before will now be the first one to get their hands on them, then only you will probably get one delivered to you. It's the same as ASICs, once every big guy has eaten the meat, then they will throw the bone to you and you will be excited like a dog. When I first heard about them I was also excited but the more research I did about them, the more I found bad about them. You should change your mind too, just think about it, I was also thinking like you earlier.
I am not protecting any underground FPGA mining. Just like mining software for GPU, FPGAs are reconfigurable so there can be someone skilled that can make their own implementations that can outperform someone else's.
Underground mining can't be avoided. That's going to be the situation in every case. People can be crippled by GPU mining too. If there were only mining software that charged 25% dev fees (there's one dev who was going to release a miner to public only if people agreed to this 25%).
There are more players here in play in case of FPGA over ASICs,
Xilinx/Intel makes FPGA,
AVNET/Digilent/Xilinx/Altera-Intel/Micron etc. make the custom FPGA solution boards
Implementations/binaries by someone skilled in HW description language, just like any GPU mining software developer.
Chances of competition is higher compared to just few ASIC mfgs (who might just kicked out by the big one) out there who control everything; too much control in hands of one entity.