ASIC vendors have made no secret of them taking part in bets about them. What Luke-Jr did on BFL's instruction was clearly a ploy to provide betsofbitco.in with implausible deniability for cancelling a bet that BFL employees were about to lose. Paying coinjedi a fraction of the value of the bet, in order to recoup most of it, makes economic sense if you make the assumption that everybody is some sort of Game of Thrones level backstabbing objectivist robber baron without any honor or shame.

A Bitcoiner Never Pays his Bets.