I am going to repeat myself:
If you are not in the site, stay away. But if you are currently a member, then wish that it could go as long as possible.
I have to say with the amount of time that i have personally been on the site, that i completely agree. I have no idea whether it is a very deep ponzi or they use other btc means to generate the coins they pay out, they claim to run a huge mining farm and are allowing you to rent power on that farm.
i do know that the minimal investment i made more than six months ago has been paid back and then some. this is not to huge degree and does not say anything for the site other than they have paid out to me consistently. i can say that the amount is 0.0005 every couple days which is not going to get me or anyone else rich and that the common bad action to follow that with would be to invest more in the site in the hopes of increasing that amount or frequency. i have given them my small investment and that is all they will get. this amount is derived from a claimed 555 GHS.
looking at the payout transactions i think this is about 85% of what that power would pay if i were running the hardware myself. more power to them for taking 15%. however, i have not mined with hardware for quite some time and cannot say for sure if that is an accurate appraisal. i used to run five 60 ghs avalon mini's for a total of around 250 GHS(those machines average around 55 GHS, not 60), i ran them from a power room and used a single large solar panel to run them. that is half the output in GHS of what I have rented and i would make around $100 from "mining", but it was not just mining, it was a time consuming process that i can only give a glimpse of to save time
1. Mine the hardware directly to ghash.io or slush's pool
I loved slush's pool, i cannot say enough for the guy, awesome pool, and as with any pool, it was awesome to see three or four blocks hit within a few hours and horrible to wait five days on one block at other times
2. while those were mining away i was watching for new altcoins and altcoins that were on the rise or shooting for the moon.
3. I also had a "rented" GHS pool at a site called eobot, they seemed pretty ok and they are starting a spiral of shutting down i think, I haven't used them in awhile but i got an email that they were selling off a bunch of hardware
4. I also used a site called miningrigrentals for two purposes
5. the rest was a juggling game, once the actual hardware mining would net around 0.5 BTC, I would start playing games, i had nothing to mine scrypt coins with, so at times i would rent mining from the above site and point it at a pool or coin that was doing very well or sometimes one that was sitting at the bottom of the heap, but getting a lot of attention. there was a time i would power mine any and every new coin to the point of around 50,000 and store them on a separate computer for at least six months.
usually about ten percent of the mined BTC went to mining scrypt coins and 20% would be banked back. that meant from every 0.5 mined i was saving 0.1 and spending 0.05 was spent on mining scrypt
that left 0.35 for other things, i usually dropped 0.05 on some site like hashocean of whatever people seemed excited about and either slowly lose the money or watch them run, i would then post the results on the forums. of the last 0.3, it would go to various things, i have used a few online "savings" accounts and done ok with around 33% of them, i have invested in bank rolls for gambling site, i have bought and sold accounts on the forums and many other things
the point is that i would love for a site like hashocean to be really and truly legit, i have made a little from it and suggest staying away at the moment because it has simply been there too long and could collapse at any time. but, if this site is not real, why can't a group put together the mining power and let others really rent into it, the main issue is that the hardware needs to be upgraded at lease once a year, but beyond that it makes sense, granted, you could bank all the coins from your mining farm directly to yourself and the group, or you could charge something like 15% and actually rent it out, add ads to your site and make some other money along the way. while you are losing most of your mining power, you are creating a source of BTC for those that cannot have that much hardware and thereby bringing the value of your own bitcoins up as time passes. it would be a long time before you rented out all of your mining power, so you still get what is left for yourself. create your own pool on the side and grab another 5% for those that use the pool, add an online wallet site and then you have another 1% in "network fees".
it is a more stable and long term working business model than hoping to power mine for the rest of your life. I finally got rid of each unit as they slowly died and have not mined with my own hardware since. it would be nice to find a mining company to rent from that i absolutely knew i could throw money into without the worry of being left high and dry by a scam, i would understand that the site would die eventually as the cost went well beyond the profit, but at least you could do some mining along the way
enough rambling, you get the idea, long story short, i think that hashocean has been around for so long that something has to give soon, not the time to invest, but, you never know, they could go another six months, they give you 15 GHS free for signing up and i think you can drop like three bucks on them to get a little more, the payoff would take more than six months to get you past that investment, but you can always put everything back into the system, they have outlasted many sites, no one knows but them