If Minnesota or California can protect the rights of their citizens, then good for them, but it does not protect LGBT individuals in Texas or the Midwest.
Yes, but Hacker News is not exactly a random slice of American voters. I would expect to find some, but not many, Trump supporters who are going to find and use a site like this.
In order for it to be a legitimate alternative, as opposed to only being of interest to ideologues and academics, shouldn't it actually be competitive with existing technologies in areas like fees, user experience, or speed? If it was better at some and worse at others, it would provide a legitimate alternative with a different set of trade-offs, but for it to lose in every category doesn't really make it seem like it can be an alternative to the centralized banking system in a real and useful way.
As Satoshi's whitepaper harps on, and, in my opinion, the biggest difference between fiat and BTC is that BTC doesn't answer to a government. That may have a premium or a discount attached to it. But if that's not an attractive reason for someone to use BTC, then yeah, we need to look at fees like you are talking about.
It doesn't lose in every category, OP just chose a specific situation in which it was very expensive and then wrote a blog post showcasing his poor planning.
As a counter-anecdote I saved hundreds of dollars transferring USD10,000 in the US to THB cash in Thailand via Bitcoin.
A well designed fiat currency system would not rely on the moral code of humans, but rather on having created an incentive structure such that the actors in power are pushed towards doing the correct thing. We have not fully accomplished this, but it is a state that we can strive towards. It is important to note that fiat currency is not based on the idea that we can reliably find and promote saints to run it (at least in theory).
Regarding the trustworthiness of social institutions, there are mechanisms for creating more trustworthy systems on top of less trustworthy parts. A simple example is TCP. It is a leaky abstraction at times, yes, but it is more trustworthy in the face of adversity than UDP is.
This is not to say that our current batch of social institutions are even as trustworthy as TCP, just that it is possible to build institutions that are, and that we have a lot more experience as a civilization with debugging social institutions than we do debugging software. Thus, I do not think it is paradoxical to lean on social institutions to reign in raw human nature.
The documentation for Effect Managers is basically "If you don't already know how to make one, you shouldn't be making one." I get that it's an "expert feature", but I want to learn and try anyways! I've been learning the basics by looking at the WebSocket library, and reading the compiler errors when I broke it in different ways. The compilers errors were surprisingly helpful, but some documentation would be nice.
A related anecdote: One of the major reasons I decided to give elm a try was when Richard Feldman was giving a talk about writing Dream Writer in elm, and he got to a point where the performance was noticeably slowing down. He started trying to make it better by 'sprinkling a few `lazy`s through the view code', and then stopped because that had magically made everything super fast again.
I have a hobby project that uses Elm on the front end with Elixir and Phoenix on the back end, and that has been working really well. Elm's event machine like architecture goes well with Phoenix's native support for channels, although the elm library for Phoenix Channels is definitely not production ready.
It has been a very bizarre experience having dynamic typing on the back end and static on the front end, though. Everything feels slightly topsy turvy.
As someone who has started to explore (and enjoy) elm, I have to say that speed is not one of the major selling points for me. Rather, seeing that it has at least competitive speed is just dodging a potential deal breaker. It could smother me in kittens and do my taxes, but if a framework only renders three frames per second, I definitely won't use it. Elm being in the same ballpark (slightly better? slightly worse? doesn't matter) means that I can see if the other features of the language entice me to try it out. They did, I did, and I really like it (even though apps that use random a lot end up being structured in a way that is strange to my brain).
