(Also, for step 3 I think proofs of storage are supposed to be calculated continuously, not once. So you'd be constantly reading data from S3.)
In general, I don't take the Filecoin whitepaper too literally. There are a lot of aspects of it that will probably have to be changed. I think the Filecoin ICO (which I didn't participate in BTW) is more of a vote of confidence on the team, not any specific protocol.
Have there been technical developments since the whitepaper?
But as the OP said there's currently no proof-of-will-to-distribute-storage so you can save money by just sending the proof-of-storages to the network and never actually provide bandwidth for the distribution of the stored data.
What's most likely going to be profitable is buying crappy consumer HDDs inside external enclosures and shoving 60 of them into a single chassis. The reliability of the storage medium doesn't matter with something like filecoin. Node failure is not just an edge case. Filecoin has to account for it by using erasure coding to survive the loss of nodes.
1. Set up a miner on AWS. You’ll only need a small machine as you’ll persist the data in S3.
2. Accept bids for storage, and use your free ingress bandwidth to copy the data into S3
3. Calculate and publish your proofs of storage so your Filecoin (held in escrow after your successful bid) is released.
4. Refuse all bids to access the content - egress bandwidth costs money!
5. Win! You’ll always be able to undercut other miners when bidding for storage as they have to bake in bandwidth costs in their bids, and you strategy is easily scalable (as you can pump as much data into S3 as you need - you’ll only need to get more machines to calculate more storage proofs).