Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think he's being fair. The real difficulty in making an ASIC is justifying the huge price to start production. The good old "the first chip is worth $10 millions, the second is worth $5" or something like that. Designing a bitcoin mining IP is not exactly difficult, it's basically two rounds of SHA-256. It's still some work of course, but as far as ASICs are concerned it's very low on the difficulty scale.
> it's basically two rounds of SHA-256. There's a bit more to this; there's clever optimisations you can do (based on the Merkle–Damgård structure of SHA256 and the format/semantics of the data being hashed): http://www.mit.edu/~jlrubin/public/pdfs/Asicboost.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1604.00575.pdf
Yeah I conveniently avoided to talk about that, but this is more like exploiting a weakness in the bitcoin protocol, it wasn't really meant to be feasible (and made many people angry when it was patented). That is innovation however, I grant you that.