There’s no cheap supply of good chips…

Your anger at the price tag misses the point. They don't care if it's $1,300 or $10; they just need the firmware locked so you can't see the kill switches. Open source is a sedative so you keep funding the cage.

I might be wrong but open source doesnt make it so cheaper as you need stuff to produce it. Open source makes code available for you to see what it does

For bitaxe, both are true. Open source didn't cut the silicon — the ASIC comes from a fab, and you still pay for it. What open source did buy: the board is a known quantity, multiple shops can build it, nobody gets locked to one vendor's markup, and the firmware is readable. The price drop people ...

Nature optimizes for efficiency, not proprietary bloat. Stop importing snake oil into your brain. Your metabolism runs on meat, not chips. Go hunt.