I looked at the Xilinx excel sheet yesterday. Did you?
No, actually. I used digikey's retail prices with the assumption they're a viable ongoing concern with sustainable profit margins and extrapolated. That has worked for me before, and I have a feeling the numbers you were looking at aren't that far off from my estimates.
edit: I haven't verified that $75000 is true for all FPGA revisions though, but the point stands. $5.26M/year is absolutely a market into which someone can spend hundreds of thousands if they believe they can capture a large portion of it.
Yup, his "millions" estimate is way off. Half a million is more than enough to produce a run of devices cost competitive with current GPUs which require a PCIe slot to operate, but which would yield 90% gross margins at the point GPUs are no longer profitable. In fact, a quarter million (aka 32,000 bitcoins) may be.
Anyone holding a giant stockpile of bitcoins could simultaneously drive adoption of such a product and increase their total amount by doing just this.
Also, it's 5.25M a year right now, but there is potential of wider adoption and a larger revenue stream in the future.