My thoughts exactly I try to buy only hardware I could learn to program myself, in a spirit of open source. There is also the arms race mentality about ASICs that I have a slight problem with; an early ASIC could soon be obsolete, but you could still develop something revolutionary on an old FPGA, GPU or CPU.

That said, I happen to have a BFL FPGA Single. I'm sure there are other people who have also stayed away from the ASIC refund, and it could be a nice engine for Blake. The sha256 performance is similar to a Ztex 1.15y. I recall reading it has two fairly high-end Altera chips, possibly of the Stratix family. (The heatsinks are glued on, so I haven't checked.)

If someone can port Blake on this thing, I am willing to donate mine for research. I have a feeling these FPGAs won't be accessible with the free Quartus, and there may be other software/electrical issues to reverse engineer.