• I was able to withdraw BTC
• Took less than 5 minutes to show up in my wallet

DAY 42
It's been a while since I posted. Quite frankly because Hashflare has been performing exactly as advertised with no drama to report. The other day I finally had enough bitcoin for a withdrawal. I submitted a withdrawal of BTC0.06. I forgot to take a screenshot before I initiated the withdrawal, but here is the message that was displayed after I completed:
 https://i.imgur.com/LqIsYwo.png
On December 31st I had BTC0.0635. I then transferred to my wallet, which sent BTC0.0629 after paying the transaction fee. Less then five minutes later, the bitcoin appeared in my Exodus wallet. You can see the withdrawal in my transaction history:
https://i.imgur.com/t4yl32g.png
And here it is appearing in my wallet.
https://i.imgur.com/wJ4ropU.png
At current rates, that translates into roughly $870 (USD) and the potential time to earn back my investment is looking like a shade under four months. (Granted, the time to ROI fluctuates with the price of bitcoin). As of today, I have BTC0.028 BTC in my Hashflare account and earning about BTC0.0026 daily.

I can finally say that I do not believe Hashflare is a scam. The mining has roughly paid out each day as predicted by various online calculators. I withdrew my money easily and with no hassle. Please note I am making no statements about whether or not cloud mining is a good or bad idea, just that Hashflare is not a scam. My opinion is that owning the machine and mining it on your own is better than cloud mining. But, if you cannot own the machine for whatever reason, cloud mining, at least when I purchased and given the current price of bitcoin is still profitable.

If you have read this far and found this thread useful and want to join Hashflare, consider signing up using my reference code: https://hashflare.io/r/324CD8C4

• Yesterday's mining results - BTC0.0025
• Total profit so far - BTC0.04
• Screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/GydxL8J.jpg

DAY 16
So here we are two+ weeks into the cloud mining adventure with Hashflare. The mining difficulty has increased and yesterday I only mined BTC0.0025 down from a previous average of about BTC0.003. However, this is basically inline with bitcoin profit calculators that now show 20 TH/s should mine about BTC0.02685 per day. You can see the recent history of my mining here: https://i.imgur.com/Q5OLhxo.jpg. As mentioned by others on this thread, ROI is always difficult to calculate based on the ever increasing difficulty. However, economists should love crypto mining - it's the ultimate perfect competition market. As profit increases, more and more people get into the business causing difficulty to rise. Ultimately, difficulty will chase price such that the most efficient miners (lowest electricity cost) are profitable and others are forced out of the industry.  Of course, the market is highly speculative which may allow some less efficient miners to stay in over time. What does this mean for cloud mining? Now is a booming time and I believe you can make money on cloud mining. In the future, if the Dash market is any indicator, I expect annual profit to approach the cost of a mining machine. Which means annual contracts will probably break even but not make any money. We can see this starting to happen now with increase in Hashflare price. I bought an S9 equivalent TH/s (13.5) for $1890. That same TH/s now costs $2970. After factoring in the maintenance fee, you will make profit with a 1-year contract with Hashflare as long as the difficulty stays the same (it won't) and the price of BTC stays over $5000 (it might). We know lots of TH/s will be coming on line over the next few months so difficulty will increase. BTC has run-up so fast it is inevitable to drop at some point, but by how much is anyone's guess.

The other topic to discuss is the Hashflare withdrawal policy. Now that I've hit the two week mark, I'm eligible to withdraw funds to my personal wallet. Yay! On my dashboard, I click the withdraw button and....find out I can't withdraw.    https://i.imgur.com/eItW8ny.png. Hashflare has temporarily changed the withdrawal policy to require a minimum withdrawal of BTC0.2. That sucks. You can see the policy here:https://i.imgur.com/QRPo1QF.jpg. Looks like I'll be waiting for either Hashflare to change their policy or a couple months until I have BTC0.2. Interestingly, I feel less worried about this policy than I have previously about other moves by Hashflare. But stay tuned and I'll let you know how it turns out.

Jay, thanks for coming online. You have to understand the mining business is replete with various scam offers, so when a company no one has heard of starts offering stuff that's too good to be true, then it probably is. If you are still monitoring this thread, perhaps you can answer a few questions for us.
1) Why are your customer service people so hesitant to give out concrete information on where your data centers are or any kind of business identification? You understand that's a key red flag indicating a scam. Now you say you are hosting at ROOT. ROOT is a data center. So sounds like you are renting space from ROOT? I will call today to try to verify if you do have any space with them. (Of course, this begs the question, why wouldn't we just go to ROOT ourselves?)
2) This is a big community. Most legitimate data centers have customers who can vouch for there services. Do you have anyone on this forum or otherwise who can vouch for your service?
3) Lastly, how are you still offering miners such as S9s at reduced rates ($1500) when everyone else is charging at 3-4 times your price?

Follow my cloud mining journey with Hashflare here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2521761.0

• Yesterday's mining results - BTC0.0029
• Total profit so far - BTC0.03
• Screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/fIaIOBt.png

DAY 13
I haven't posted for a couple days. I've been a little busy. Apart from life, I've been trying to find actual miners to purchase. Too make a long story short, Litecoin and Bitcoin miners are just all overpriced right now. I feel like when difficulty increases or price decreases, a lot of people will realize they seriously overpaid. Ironically, you can get Dash miners for less than original cost, so I actually purchased a new Bitmain D3 with APW3++ on eBay for $1000. Set it up in my garage and it has been running for a couple days with some minor issues. Gotta admit, it's a lot less stressful then cloud mining since daily payouts go direct to my wallet.

Anyway, back to Hashflare....daily payouts have remained fairly constant at around 0.003 per day. I now have BTC0.032, but I still can't withdraw. First, because of the two week hold on credit card accounts. Second because Hashflare has stopped all payouts. Getting a payout is the last major hurdle to cross before I will feel comfortable with Hashflare. UPDATE: Just noticed that Hashflare plans to restore withdrawals on 12/18 (that's tomorrow). So, in a few days, I'll be able to test out the withdrawal process and let you know if it worked.

Also, by now you all know, the drama over the domain name is ended. Hashflare renewed their domain for another year as I expected they would.

Honestly, I'm starting to feel these guys are less a scam and more just a poorly run company.

Yeah, I got the same message. Worrisome to say the least. I'm keeping a positive attitude and thinking at least they are communicating with us. So, maybe they're just a poorly run business and not a scam. But, still overall makes no sense to me why they need to suspend transactions.

Wow! I thought I was jumping in head first. That's a lot of TH.

Congratulations! That's good to hear. I'm most worried about them not paying out. So if you got a payment, even if it took 16 hours, that's a positive sign. Hopefully, they are just a poorly run business and not a scam.

I have not tried to withdraw. I purchased my TH/s with a credit card and Hashflare puts a 14 day hold on accounts started with a credit card. So, I'll have to wait a week before I can try a withdrawal.

Those 100 already gone. 

• Yesterday's mining results - BTC0.003
• Total profit so far - BTC0.0194
• Screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/xPxHCJj.jpg

DAY 8
No real change in mining profitability. 3 days until Hashflare domain expiration and counting.

• Yesterday's mining results - BTC0.0032
• Total profit so far - BTC0.0167
• Screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/8Iof7uY.jpg

DAY 7
I forgot to post yesterday. Hey, I got busy. I have a life. Even today's post is rushed as I have people yelling at me that we need to go. Anyway, the bitcoin mining has stabilized and is consistently around 0.3 mined per day less maintenance fee. The results continue to be inline with calculations from other sites as to mining expectations given 20.25 TH/s. I also decided to go 100% with Slush mining pool. To make a long story short, they have the best rates and fees. They are small, but I figure I'd get a bigger share of the bit coins they do mine.

So, we are 4 days away from the big hurdle - will Hashflare renew the domain name or not? That is the latest thing to worry me, fortunately I don't have much time to ponder as I must go now.

• Yesterday's mining results - BTC0.003
• Maintenance and electricity fee - BTC0.0004
• Daily Profit - BTC0.0026
• Total profit so far - BTC0.0115
• Screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/GgQceRM.png

DAY 6
I made BTC0.0026 yesterday, about the same as the day before. I now have BTC0.0115 which, ironically, is exactly the minimum withdrawal amount. Oh yeah, Hashflare just updated their policy. They have increase the minimum withdrawal to 0.0115 with a transaction fee of 0.0015. I believe this is more than double their previous transaction fee which was 0.0006. They were having lots of complaints about transactions, so looks like they raised the fee in response to try and get the transactions to go through faster. I'd love to test it out, but I have to wait another week before I can withdraw from the account. I purchased my TH/s with a credit card and they put a 2-week hold on withdrawals from accounts with credit card purchases. So, we'll see how that goes in two weeks. Overall, the contract has performed as expected. However, there are two key hurdles Hashflare must pass to gain more of my trust. 1) They need to renew their domain name which is still set to expire on December 15. 2) I need a successful withdrawal from the account to my wallet, which I should be able to do in 8 more days.

• Yesterday's mining results - BTC0.003
• Maintenance and electricity fee - BTC0.0004
• Daily Profit - BTC0.0026
• Total profit so far - BTC0.0088
• Screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/dLUeHIw.jpg

DAY 5
Another day, another BTC0.0026. No Hashflare drama in the last 24-hours. The BTC yield per day is going down, but each day I check with cryptocompare and the results basically are in line. So, looks like we are seeing the effects of new TH/s coming on line. Profit per TH/s declines daily. I suppose it's economics at work. If Dash is any example, profit per TH/s will continue to decline until it's no longer cost effective to make new machines. D3's that were selling for over $2600 a few months ago can be found on Ebay for less than $1000 now, and you don't see any manufacturer's rushing out new machines. Depending on electricity costs, it will take about a year to get ROI on a D3 at $1000 given current Dash prices. I suspect SHA-256 will go the same route with people selling S9s for under $1000 at some point in the future.

How can it be legit?

Do the math. An S9 uses 1.35kWh. Over the course of a day thats 32.4kWh.

If they are hosting for $500/year, divide that by 365, and they are hosting for $1.36/day.

Now, lets divide the daily fee by the S9 daily electricity usage. $1.36 / 32.4kWh = $0.04/kWh. Look at your electricity bill, are you getting anywhere near $0.04/kWh. Average in US is like $0.10/kWh. Cheapest I've heard is some people in hydroelectric area getting $0.3/kWh. So, at most, they could make like $0.25/day hosting your miner. Now ask, would you host someone's miner for $0.25/day profit (assuming you had super cheap electricity)?

But, if you somehow know they are legit, then it's a heluva deal.

I did check the companies most often touted as legitimate. As of December 4, 2019, here is what I found:
- Genesis Mining - from research this is the company I would have preferred to work with. However they are not selling any TH/s.
- Hashnest - has been bought by Bitmain. The site is pretty byzantine. After clicking a bunch of stuff, near as I can tell, you cannot buy an TH/s.
- Eobot - requires 5 year contracts and charges ridiculous rates. They are charging $36000 for the equivalent hashing power of one Antminer s9!

TL;DR - Hashflare is back up. They didn't still our money. I made BTC0.0033 yesterday.
https://i.imgur.com/gPD1PDU.jpg

DAY 4 UPDATE

Well, that was embarrassing. I made a complete fool of myself flipping out when the Hashflare site went down. In case you missed it, I posted that Hashflare was a big scam and they stole all our money. I went to sleep angry and had a restless night. How could I be so foolish as to ignore all the warning signs? Lots of people were saying cloud mining is a scam but I bought into it hook, line, and sinker. These thoughts are running through my mind all night. I'm waking up every hour, looking at the ceiling, thoughts running through my mind. It's a long night. When I get up, bleary eyed and dreading going to work tired, I call my credit card company. I'm going to see if there is anyway they can reverse the charges since I bought into a scam. After going through the normal dance of navigating the computer voice menus, I finally get a person on the phone. I'm talking to the customer service representative and explaining what happened and the site isn't even there anymore. She sympathizes with me and then drops a bombshell.
"Sir, the site is called hashflare.io?"
"Yes," I respond
"Sir, I am able to get to the site. Can you try it again?"

I was so distraught I hadn't tried to go to the site since last night. I go to the Hashflare site on my computer and sure enough the site comes up. I login and there is a message that the site was down for maintenance and some of the payments may be processed late. Ok I think. At least the site is there. But, I'm still in a negative mood and I assume "late" payment means never. Of course, that thought is quickly wiped out as I scan down and see my balance is 0.006 BTC. Looking at the history I see I mined 0.0033 BTC yesterday less the maintenance fee of 0.0005 BTC.
"Sir, are you there?" The representatives voice brings me back to reality. I quickly apologize for my drama and get off the phone.

Could Hashflare actually have been down for maintenance? I have to assume so. Certainly it's bad business practice not to warn customers you will be down for maintenance, especially when more than half the mining community thinks you are a scam. But Hashflare is not exactly a fortune 500 company. Can we really expect the best business practices? It's still too early to tell, but so far, Hashflare seems legit. Don't get me wrong there are lots of troubling signs. For example, how are they able to sell seemingly unlimited TH/s when literally every other company is sold out and you can't even buy a decent miner for less than 3 times the book price? It would be nice if they stated how many petahashes they had available for rent like eobot does. Still, to date, my every worry has turned out to be unfounded.

TL;DR - Hashflare website is down. They have taken all our money.

DAY 4

It's about time to check my cloud mining results for the day. But, first I think I'll see if there are any new comments on the blog. There's an interesting comment/post from @rubyrain about his experience. The post mentions I should use a referral code to get some bitcoins credit if people sign up using the link. TBH, I won't use it since I want the blog to be as unbiased as possible. But, I also hadn't paid attention to the referral program when I signed up. So, sometime around 0300 UTC, I go log into the Hashflare site to check the referral program. Sure enough, there is a referral code and link you give out. There are also some referral materials. I click on the link to see the referral materials and suddenly I'm looking at a 502 Gateway error.
https://i.imgur.com/fGimYcr.png
I try and refresh the page several times, but honestly, I instantly know what's happened. My worse fears have been realized - Hashflare is gone. I think I'm going to throw up. Hashflare is just gone. 502 error can mean a lot of things, but instinctively, I know it means they have taken down the website. I hope I'm wrong. I hope I'll wake up in the morning and discover it was some kind of maintenance. I know I won't. I guess the question that started this journey has been answered -- Hashflare was a big scam.

TL;DR - This is a scam

I emailed the company. I immediately got a reply from their customer service rep "Shirley." She was very nice and we exchanged several emails. I asked for proof they were not a scam. She invited me to tour the facilities in Montreal, Canada. I agreed to the tour. I asked her for an address and when could I come tour the facilities. I still haven't gotten a response. UPDATE: I emailed again asking about the tour. Shirley said "As of right now, we are expanding and re-locating our data center. Once we have confirmed the new site, we will arrange a day for you to visit. " Yeah, Ok.

Follow my cloud mining journey here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2521761.0

TL;DR - Day 2: Earned BTC0.0033 using 20.25 TH/s

DAY 2 BLOG BELOW
Yesterday, my BTC earnings showed up on my dashboard at 0349 UTC. Today, I anxiously await 0349 UTC and nothing appears. Hmm. Not good. I refresh the screen a minute later at 0350 and my BTC appears!  
https://i.imgur.com/0Ff4kfA.png
I mined BTC0.0038 less maintenance fees (about $7 USD) for a net of BTC0.0033.
https://i.imgur.com/R90p1aZ.png
So far so good. It's only been two days, but I don't see any reason to complain. The results have matched the estimated results from sites that calculate mining profit based on TH/s. At this point, I imagine the next real test will come in a month when I have BTC0.1 and attempt to withdraw it.

On a side note, I changed my mining pool allocation today. I am mining 50% Slush and 50% Antpool. The reason is Slush has the lowest PPS fee (2%) of all the mining pools available on Hashflare, but it is a medium sized pool accounting for only 10% of all mining. Antpool has a slightly larger PPS fee (2%) and they keep all transaction fees, but they account for 16% of all mining. So, I figure between the two I am participating in 26% of all found blocks. Over time, Antpool will find more blocks but pay me less on each found block while Slush will find fewer blocks but pay more for each found block. In fact, after thinking about it, I'll add BTC.com back to my mining pools tomorrow. They have high PPS fees (4%), but account for 16% of all found blocks. If I use all three pools, I will have a stake in 42%-43% of all found blocks.