"To atone, you must pay a total of 0.00001122 bitcoins (0.01122 mBTC; 1122 satoshi)." - that's what you need to pay to post your message on bitcointalk.org
the smallest amount I can send is actually 0.0002 BTC which is about $2.95 but it costs $29.24 in bitcoin transaction fees to send it!.
i think we need to realize that bitcoin isn't ideal for micropayments as is. including every $2 payment on the blockchain for all eternity doesn't make sense if we want people to be able to enforce the consensus rules with their own nodes. i think that in a year's time, both you and bitcointalk will have open LN channels that will allow a much cheaper payment.
But the fact is that trading on regulated US exchanges like the CME is prohibitively expensive for most people. The CME’s contract size for 1 futures contract is 5 Bitcoins, currently worth almost $100,000, and you’ve got to put down 50% margin to be able to buy or sell 1 contract. On top of that you’re paying round turn commissions of at least $10 per round turn on every trade you do.
it's much cheaper to trade the CBOE contracts, which are valued at 1 bitcoin. i'm pretty sure that you can access the market with considerably less using leverage.
The alternative to CME is to trade Bitcoin futures on relatively unregulated exchanges like Bitmex or OKCoin where you can trade with much smaller amounts and where your account balance is denominated in Bitcoin. But those exchanges charge percentage based transaction fees on your trades that are getting higher all the time, making it impossible to trade profitably as a short term trader taking small profits.
i haven't seen any recent changes to the fees charged at bitmex or okcoin. trading commissions (on futures) on either platform are significantly cheaper than spot margin exchanges like bitfinex.
