In 2017 I want to move my digital electronics skills from "patching together 30 years old ICs on a breadboard while playing with devkits" to "designing a simple board with modern components". I'm finally taking the plunge to SMD soldering, and the ultimate goal will be to make a fully functional JAMMA game board using a decent FPGA (a project I left incomplete 10 years ago, which has always bugged me).
Well... The consensus is that RethinkDB is technically superior (and much more pleasant to use), but unfortunately that doesn't prevent it from being in a hard position business-wise...
In my experience (10 years living in Japan) it's actually extremely easy to do bank transfers, so easy that actually many people use bank transfer to pay for online purchases. It does cost a bit though (from ~100 to ~600 Yens depending on the amount, time of day, and size of banks involved), and the sender has to pay that amount, not the receiver. That makes it an even bigger incentive for sellers to accept this way of payment.
I am a very happy user of Phoenix myself, and also a MMO game programmer, and unfortunately I can say with confidence that you won't implement a real-time MMO FPS on top of Phoenix channels any soon.
Not because of Phoenix itself, but because all modern lag-compensating techniques rely on specific properties of UDP that are not implementable over TCP (and thus not over Websockets or HTTP long poll, which are the currently supported Phoenix Channel transports).
Not to diminish the value of Phoenix: the framework is really pleasant to use both on dev side and ops side. And you could use it today to implement the server-side of most games, even some "massive multiplayer" ones, as long as latency is not your primary concern.
You are right our default transports (WS/LongPoll) are not well suited for FPS requirements, but just to be clear transports are adapter based and you can implement your own today for your own esoteric protocol or serialization format. Outlined here:
http://hexdocs.pm/phoenix/Phoenix.Socket.Transport.html
The backend channel code remains the same and the transport takes care of the underlying communication details.
As a "bilingual Japanese/English engineer who has startup-compatible risk tolerances, is comfortable working in a bicultural environment under a minimum amount of supervision, can solo-ship code in one or more modern programming stacks", I indeed have had to check on a few occasions whether the stated salary was monthly or daily. Generally a good sign that the talk is not going anywhere...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tatami (section "Size")