Thanks for your input but that's way too vague. I was looking for first hand experience by users that have actually been invested in Hashnest for a long period of time. Numbers, charts, excel spreadsheets, screenshots: In short, your journey on Hashnest - that's what I was looking for. I'd love it if some of you would share their wisdom .. at least a little of it : )
Thanks!
hey lechatelier, sorry I don't have enough time to get charts and all that, but I can tell you my experience. I purchased more or less 1.5 TH of S5 shares since shortly after their launch (was it a year ago?), until the shutdown of S5 mining recently. I got ROI and a little more (around 20% profit) but that includes also profit from trading shares on the market.
As you probably know, hashnest deducts the cost of electricity and manteinance from your mining earnings, in dollars. So when the price of bitcoin goes up, the manteinance cost is a small fraction of the payout (as few BTC equals more USD), but when BTC goes down in price or difficulty spikes too much, your earnings get smaller. This happens until earnings are almost zero at the end of a miner's lifespan (when difficulty is too high), then hashnest offers you the choice to redeem the machine(s) physically (but who would like to pay for shipping of a heavy and noisy heater) or sometimes will offer you some kind of discount coupon instead if you prefer. Unless you somehow have free electricity and live close to china, I don't think shipping the miner is worth it.
You can always trade those shares representing hash power on their electronic market, but it can be hard to decide if you want to sell it for instant gains, or keep the hash to receive mining income (like stock "dividends"). To make those decisions, you should make your own calculations like "price per GH/s", how much more expensive or cheap it would be for you to just buy or sell btc, or buy a physical miner, etc, and also time needed for ROI in case you would prefer to just "buy and hold". To calculate ROI time, this link is useful:
http://nextdifficulty.com/It will show you the time for ROI at current difficulty, for the kind of shares you have.
I know it's weird, but I think this cloud mining isn't so good as an investment, but more as a way of forcing you to spend your BTC little by little, since you get it back in drops until ROI, lol.
Good luck.