ASICs are dominated by Bitmain, and the chips are made as cheap as possible because they have absolutely no use outside of cryptomining. Bitmain can dominate at this because of the relatively low R&D / time investment and pure volume plays on the supply chain.

FPGAs have broad uses in many industries, and two large companies produce high performance versions. Neither is trying to sell end user products, but taking essentially the same route as Nvidia and AMD albeit in a higher margin market. Many end product suppliers can exist.

If 100,000 miners want FPGAs they can have them, just like GPUs. After that they have useful lives in all sorts of data processing. They’re flexible, programmable, and efficient.

I’ve yet to have someone explain to me why they think FPGAs are so bad but GPUs are so good. If you have two sources for $350 devices with similar mining performance why is one inherently bad?