Anyway, i read all the topic and i'm still very confused, and i'm not the one.
I think the short story is that you're supposed to shell out big bucks for hardware some anonymous programmer you've never met is going to maybe produce code for sometime that may or may not bring a ROI but they'll get their 4% whatever.
And if you think old asics are just space heaters, this hardware won't even keep your basement warm.
If you think that is the short story then you are just as confused as the guy you are replying to.
Re: your short story. I have shelled out big bucks for GPUs to run miners written by anonymous programmers I've never met either.
How is that different? Ok, this particular anonymous programmer has no public track record, yet. But neither did Claymore et al at some stage.
While it's winter where I am and I appreciate the heat I would far prefer to be able to run more miners on the same circuit and dig a heater out of storage if that's what it takes.
There is an army of anonymous programmers for CPU/GPU's so your risk is way lower. But FPGAs are totally different and a lot more complex. Claymore only recently started using Assembly in his miners and it gave him a small advantage. But C and C++ are a lot more robust for GPU's so he did not need to use ASM in the beginning. That is not the case for FPGA's. yes you get C for FPGA's but they are at best rudimentary and VHDL and Verilog are very much alien in comparison. I doubt that GPU's programmers can and will make the jump to FPGA's. As much as an Engish person can easily learn Russian. both are languages but will require significant effort and mind shift!