You mean, just like banks are federated and communicate only occasionally? :) I mean, it's conceptually the same solution for the same sort of problem: slow propagation of data and the need to maintain (the illusion of a) single global ledger. For banks, it was much much slower in the past, they're fine now.

Just because it's "like banks" doesn't mean it's invalid. That was my first impression, too when reading: can't we be slightly more on Layer 2?

The whole value proposition is that the currency's monetary policy isn't controlled by government, or corporate/political relationship that Federal reserve banks have currently.

If the structure models current banks in most ways except that the currency isn't in their control, then it will be a massive improvement.

Replacing government politics with the politics of a handful of developers/miners/businessmen? (see the current debacle with bitcoin/cash/segwit/2x)

Of course. Because in clear ways you are more sovereign individual within Bitcoin's politics than government politics. You can opt out, you can choose your politics, switching costs are much lower, therefore incentives to align with you are higher.

You can opt out of Bitcoin as long as it's unpopular as it is now. Zimbabweans also opted out of the Zimbabwe dollar which is why now what you really want there is a US dollar.

https://cosmos.network/ and https://polkadot.io/ experiment with a similar ideas.

Wow, that's super interesting, I've never heard about something like that proposed before. Same protocol, but layered and sharded, basically.

The Ethereum guys proposed something like this in a super long rambling document with lots of made up terminology [1]

https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Sharding-FAQ

Yeah! We can also do 'cross chain atomic swaps'; A trustless tx that allows two chains to agree on a price. Either both sides claim it, or the money is returned to its sender.

There are quite a few projects working on "cross-chain" solutions:

https://cosmos.network

https://ark.io

https://omg.omise.co

And more

Ethereum sharding?

https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Sharding-FAQ

Check out Ethereum's Plasma proposal: plasma.io. It's a similar concept. I'd describe it as tree of blockchains with MapReduce for state transitions and merkle trees for proofs.

Most people sending money to bkk the transaction fees are the least of their concerns.

That is literally the Ethereum scalability strategy called Plasma networks.