Regarding payouts...

You are paid for three things.   

1.  Gigabyte hours.  This can be thought of 1 gigabyte of stored data + 1 hour of having it online = 1 gigabyte hour.  If you have 50 gigabytes, and you have your node up for 744 hours in a month, you would have 37,200 Gigabyte hours.   You must have at least 744 gigabyte hours to earn a payout.

2.  Downloaded shards.  This is the data you are storing.  Every time the person who stored that data, downloads it, you earn some money.

3.  Telemetry.  If you are sending telemetry, you earn some money for this.



  Right now, Storj is in the roll-out phase of the billing system.  Where Farmers will be paid all-the-time via micropayments.   However, this is not yet rolled out, and customers cannot yet purchase storage from Storj.

So Storj is paying the Farmers themselves.  The amount they are paying is low.   On average you will make between $1 and $10 for the month.

This is expected to rise when the billing system has finished rolling out.