Already read lots of posts and it seems like nobody knows how payouts are calculated. What I'm extremely afraid of is to put money in Hashlets and experience the same of what happened to my Scrypt miners: payouts fell dramatically in a matter of days and never ROI'd. At least with BTC, we can minimally observe and forecast upcoming difficulty.
What guarantees that the pool contracts cited as one of the source of those payouts will continue to be honored by those who sign them it up until the point there's positive ROI? Maybe they were paid in advance to cover a long contract duration so as to guarantee payouts? That would seem unlikely and highly risky by those people.
Can we conclusively say that Hashlet payouts are better than BTC payouts per $1 invested?
tl;dr: No
We simply don't know what risk factors are involved with hashlets. For example if you buy a SHA256 miner there are several variables to consider:
Purchase price - known in advance
Maintenance/electricity cost - known in advance, unlikely to change
Mining revenue (difficulty)
Bitcoin exchange rate
Risk of equipment failure
With hashlets we have:
Purchase price - known in advance
Maintenance/electricity cost - known ATM, may change
Mining revenue (difficulty) - ?
Bitcoin exchange rate
Risk of equipment failure - none
Risk of the whole thing going south - ?
We don't even know if difficulty has any effect on earnings, and if it does, which coin's difficulty that would be? Bitcoin? Litecoin? If there are any other revenue risks (private rentals whatever that means) then we are even more in the dark.
We also don't know which way the maintenance cost is going to go, presumably down based on promises, but T&C says "up or down", and even if it always goes down it doesn't mean much without having any insight into the revenue side.
One thing hashlets have over physical miners is the risk of equipment failure, which I'm assuming would be none (or covered by the maintenance fee or whatever).