@BrightSilence: Very detailed post 
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I do agree with the idea of gifting some ETH to SNOs. Not a lot is needed but indeed, getting some ETH ourselves involves a large amount (in my case with AtomicWallet, I would have to purchase a minimum of €50 (USD 55.60) worth of ETH).
Well I don’t know, I guess it depends on the idea of “very profitable” 
If one wanted to make a bit of money every month as an SNO, even though I do know that currently the Beta is not representative of what real usage will be like when the project goes live, my understanding right now is as follows:
- First and foremost (as in before starting your Node), you need a STORJ Wallet. Not everyone is comfortable with crypto currencies so that’s a first difficulty to overcome. That said, it’s quite easy to install a Wallet, and StorjLabs’ documentation is okay on that matter I think.
- Right now, my node provides roughly 500GB of egress data each month, and at the moment stores 1TB of data and counting. Let’s roughly estimate that it will get me $10 for bandwidth, and $1.5 for storage. That is a total of $11.5 per month.
I know it’s likely to change when the node gets full and/or when the project is actually in production but let’s assume these figures stay stable over time in the future. - At current STORJ’s rate (1 STORJ = USD 0.108034), that would get me 106.448 STORJ, sent to my Wallet address.
- I do not know of any platform that recognises STORJ as a currency that can be converted to fiat directly, which means I would need to use an exchange platform like Binance to convert my STORJ amount to BTC first.
In order to send my STORJ balance to Binance, AtomicWallet requires me to pay a network fee of 0.00145278 ETH (USD 0.21) - Once on Binance, it tells me that if I were to sell 106 STORJ (it does not accept decimals for STORJ coins), I would get 0.00161756 BTC (USD 11.44).
- Then, I need to send this BTC amount to another platform that can convert BTC to fiat. I chose a French one because I’m French… (no one’s perfect
) and mostly because it will make my tax return easier to make: Paymium.
For sending BTC, Binance takes a fee of 0.0005 BTC (USD 3.53). So i’d receive 0.00111756 BTC (USD 7.90). - Now! Still need to get real money out of my BTC balance. On Paymium, the fee for withdrawing to my fiat account is €0.99 (USD 1.10).
Which means that (assuming such a small amount would be accepted) I would receive approximately USB 6.80 on my account. - But wait, my government is very proud to officially recognize and support crypto-currencies, because we are at the cutting edge of technology. A nice way to say that it’s taxed. Here in France, they tax 30% of crypto currency incomes. That would be a tax of USD 2.04.
That leaves me with a grand total of 6.80 - 2.04 (french tax) - 0.21 (ETH fee) = USD 4.55 net, for a month.
(and I’m not taking into account hardware wear-off quite hard to estimate anyway, or electricity costs which would be around USD 2.00 a month in my case)
Obviously, withdrawing earned STORJ to fiat every month doesn’t seem like a good idea, and the ratio between the gross STORJ amount and the final net amount received on my account would be better if I were to withdraw my balance every 6 months for instance. But I’d rather get paid regularly than just once or twice a year…
Of course, all of this applies specifically to my personal situation, your mileage may vary.
But from where I stand, my conclusions are:
- It’s far from being “very profitable” in my opinion, unless nodes prove to have a drastically higher Egress when the whole project is live (let’s hope so
) - It’s incredibly cumbersome to get real money from our STORJ amount.
I think it’d be an improvement if StorjLabs were offering an easy way to directly convert our STORJ coins to fiat, or at least to a very popular currency like BTC.
Another approach would be to provide ways to spend directly STORJ coins for some services or goods…