The S4 are cheaper then we paid for the S2 and I have achieved ROI on all my Bitmain equipment. Th 1295 price with coupon is not a bad price. You will fined free shipping on a heavy device by any seller is getting very unusual. Not the norm any more.
Just my 2 Cents.
You better keep your 2 cents, your gonna need em if you buy the S4 at the price. Even with the coupon, you will never get your investment back! The reason they want you to buy the machine and send it to them is so that they get the benefit of increasing the pools hash rate. This also means that they get to charge you for the "maintenance" of the miner. However...You can't say these people are stupid! That's for certain. Here's how it plays out....
Hashnest gets your miner and you pay for the shipping and of course the machine at a price where they make a lot of money. We will call that money #1 . Then they get the increase in hashing power which, after a while, will be so outrageous that they will either take over the entire bitcoin network or be very near to it. At that time, and of course when you machine is producing nothing at all (like 1 dollar a month or sooner since they will probably offer you 25 dollars to buy it out at that point) they will get your machine for basically nothing. Even if you don't want to sell it to them, you will not have a choice since shipping to you will probably cost you $100 or more as they get special super (and I mean super!!) low rates from FedEx and UPS to send to the states and really anywhere outside of China. However, you will have to get your own shipping to pick it up! If not, they will charge you just slight lower than the current rate you would normally pay if you did it yourself. So, why add insult to injury? You would sell at that point. Here's why they pick up more money in value since you know that any machine is worth more than $25.00, at lest for the next year anyway. So that's money #2. Then they get to use that increase in hash power to put in the advertisement's to get more people and get other people to quit mining so they their shares go up. That's money #3. After that, they will eventually own the network with over 51% and they can pretty much do what they like. Ghash may still be around but most of the others will be gone. I know I will. I have a large farm and 1th right now is only producing $159 a month and that's at the absolute maximum. Next week when it drops again due to difficulty, it will be $149! The price of bitcoin right now as of this writing is $374 USD. The graphs of the mining activity are going BACKWARDS! This is the first time in about a year that I have ever seen this! 6 blocks are still coming in at 1 HOUR to complete! Normally after this time since the difficulty change you would normally see 52 to 56 minutes for 6 blocks. Being that a ton of people quit mining this week, and sold all their coins I'm sure, the rate is going down and the coin price is following. This can all easily be seen at bitcoinwisdom.com When the gray and the blue lines drop below the red and stay there, nothing good comes of it I assure you! It happened one other time but it was just a few hours and that's when the price came down to 450 for the first time after running up to $1000. This has been sitting here for some time now and I don't see a correction.
The S4 can not make money for us, but as you can easily see above, it makes money out of every orifice for Bitmain. They sell you the golden goose for too much money and then they take all the golden eggs in the end and in some cases hold your goose hostage for transport fees to get him back of which at that time he is either near dead or DOA!
Unless the price turns around and goes up another $300+ on top of what it is (not holding my breath with a guy holding on to 30,000 bitcoins he bought for 20M dollars and already sees 5M in losses and is just a matter of time before he dumps them into the market and we see the coin go to less than $100)! Everything stated here is the truth. I love the coin and concept, always have. Just never thought the Chinese were going to run it into the ground like this. Now the only real unknown question here is...When is the hedge fund that bought all those coins (they were most all bought by 1 person BTW) is going to realize that selling now and taking a 5M loss is better than waiting until later and taking a 15M loss!