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.
I said ASIC.
None of you seem to understand the cost to produce an ASIC.
You also don't seem to realize the risk averse nature of capital holders, and the Bitcoin market is shit compared to other investment opportunities.
Bitcoin is a scam. No-one in their right mind is going to spend any significant amount of money to see the scam through to it's completion.