I don't think it's necessarily about using an FPGA on the cloud for your crypto miner as much as it is about reducing the costs (not specifically monetary) associated with hardware design in general. As the blog states: "Access to hardware: Hmmm. This is still a problem." The traditional reasoning would argue that spinning a chip is so prohibitively expensive, so why bother reducing other costs for the open source community?

Unlike the software community where we have nice open source libraries to do the useful and boring bits of of your software stack, more or less everything that's more complicated than a floating point adder is IP. (ARM CPU, PCIe controller, Ethernet controller, Internal fabric, DRAM controller.) Now you can go and buy this IP from other companies like ARM and Synopsis, but it costs money.

Then once you have made an architecture you like, there will be another group of companies wanting hundreds of thousands of dollars for their simulation tools (which are painfully outdated.) And they can charge so much because creating silicon is really expensive!

We have a long way to go on both of these fronts, because making open source hardware blocks and open source toolchains is much harder than it sounds, and for what benefit? It's still several million for masks.

For a startup trying to make innovative hardware however, Those things can mean faster development times, fewer engineers needed, and reduced IP royalty fees. For the industry, it gives students a lower barrier to entry to the field, so that when they come out of college they can be ramp up quicker. For me as a hardware engineer, it makes my life better, as it gives me hope that some day my tools won't be outdated and overpriced.