yeah fpgas .. lol forgot to mention those.
well i dont know for sure.. but china tends to have stuff like that waaay cheaper than anywhere else. i remember prospero asics were offered at $300 for 100gh sha-256 out of china while other miner manufacturers were still selling at up to $3000usd for the very same hashrate at the time. they even sell standalone asic chips on their website.
I do agree, the SHA-256 chips sold for ridiculous prices when the Avalons cut their batch three around this time last year. There was also the whole Klondike chip thing, and the PCB board set. That on top of BFL and the immense amount of hashrate that came from the success of KNC (although there is the whole issue with their second batch Jupiters). But if you look at the SHA-256 mining scene, ASICs was one of the driving factors that pushed their caps from ~$350M to ~$3.25B (the original Avalons and initial BFLs), and then a second push from ~$1.5B to ~$14B (in line with the KNC Jupiters, wave 3 of BFLs, PCB Klondikes). Frankly, I expect the same type of trend as sCrypt ASICs are propagated more and more; the only difference is that it will not be to the same magnitude and at most a handful of coins will get to ride the upswing while the rest are crushed.
The funny thing is that as scary as it is right now with a conservative maximum total amount of hash put into sCrypt being around 750 GH/s, that should be just a fraction of what the first few waves of major ASICs will be pushing. If KNC and Fibonacci stick to their roadmap, we'll be looking at a possible 5+ TH/s in sCrypt.
That's not necessarily a comforting thought for the GPU scene, but it'll do a hell of a lot for network security for whichever coins stick as sCrypt. That and the residual
As a note, I apologize if I came off as brash or anything like that. I was just trying to be more direct than anything.
