We need a true peer-to-peer Internet instead of the centralized, feudal system we currently have. CRDTs would allow for peers to own their data and collaborate without centralized servers owned by Big Tech, but even the network itself goes through a small number of pipes owned by telecom companies that can decide what gets through and when. Decentralization is the real big idea behind CRDTs.

This one isn't a dupe, it came back through the second chance pool but in the meantime a second submission did take and got a lot of comments:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45177518 - 87 comments

What is the monoid for table primary keys?

We really ought to come up with some new terms in this space... it is just confusing to mix "strong consistency" in with "eventual consistency" in any way.

A common pattern I see is data-plane nodes receiving versioned metadata updates from the control-plane. As long as the version is higher than the node's previous one, it's correct to use. So, the metadata is a sort of monotonic counter with a bag of data attached to it. This pattern produces a monotonic counter, which I assume is a naive sort of CRDT - though the data itself doesn't benefit from CRDT merge semantics. In this world, as long as a node gets an update, its going to incorporate it into its state. In the article's terms, the system has Strong Convergence.

I'm trying to figure out under what practical circumstances updates would result in Eventual Convergence, not Strong Convergence. Wouldn't a node incorporate an update as soon as you receive it? What's causes the "eventual" behavior even after a node gets an update?

It seems to me the trouble is actually getting the update, not the data model as such. Yes, I realize partial orders are possible, making it impossible to merge certain sequences of updates for certain models. CRDTs solve that, as they're designed to do. (Though I hear that, for some CRDTs, merges might result in bad "human" results even if the merge operation follows all the CRDT rules.)