UserPersistence should be Future-centric

(Bug, Investigate , Priority: Critical, Test Status: No automated tests yet , Reported By Justin du Coeur, )
Summary: Currently, most of the calls in UserPersistence are synchronous. That's insane. Rewrite them to be async instead.
Note that they don't really need Actors per se. But they should all return Future to begin with, and some should get rewritten further.