It is is good question. WHY would they make a miner for blake2b?
I asked that a few pages back... seems kind of random. Someone else here suggested maybe its to f--k with the team behind Sia, who is also making miners? Seems petty to spend so much money on miners just to funk with a competitor... but with only ONE coin to mine on this machine, who knows? At least with D3's one could play an Altcoin game and mine a few other random things with it. This is literally a brick once profitability dies, and you don't even get to play with anything else. Just seems weird.
Oh well... they still make $10M selling them.
Its simple really. First off Obelisk kind of fucked themselves by posting the numbers of pre-orders. It doesn't take much for Bitmain to look and see that if a few thousand people are willing to pay $1600 to a new company that won't even bring a product to market for 6+ months, then even more people will pay $600 more to get the same performance in 10 days. Bitmain also has economies of scale. All of their miners are essentially the same with different circuit boards in them. They already have manufacturing and infrastructure in place. I imagine they could make ASIC miners for most altcoins relatively easily and cheaply, but why bother? They have been selling the same S9 for what seems like forever, and its going up in price instead of down.