And you might as well be satisfied now, for I probably was already ripped off.
Well I'm not satisfied by that at all and think it is a sad indictment of human nature.
So we are to believe that these people with no history of participation in the Bitcoin community have spent >$1million and the last 12 months designing and building a Bitcoin protocol specific ASIC chip, then designed and built the board and software to interface with it, all without consulting anyone in the Bitcoin community?
If you believe that, I have some magic beans you might be interested in.
You are just making assumptions here. They may have done nothing at all or they may in fact be in communication with someone in the bitcoin community. It might be a scam or just deluded enthusiasm. There's no telling really. It does seem unlikely but then we know nothing to base that critique on. They might be able to get masks done on the cheap or they might have a rich uncle who just loves bitcoins.
The nature of difficulty goes against mass production of ASICs. People always say they will create them for he benefit of the network and sell them. At the end of the day, if you can hash more quickly than everyone else you are not going to want to lose that edge. There is no point in ramping up the difficulty quicker. So this alone is enough to believe that every ASIC development is a scam as there is literally no incentive to bring everyone along for the ride, the only incentive is to get everyone to pay for your ride.