In practice "1000 people edit same thing at same time" is not a problem that needs to be solved via software, the users are just doing silly things and getting silly results.
It doesn't need to make sense, or be the most recent change, only that given the same inputs, everyone independently agrees on the same output.
In practice during CouchDB's heyday, with lots of heavy users, the conflict management API almost never mattered, as most people can make do with deterministic merges.
It seems wrong to rely on NTP for a distributed system like this, but I couldn't really figure out a better way at the time.
Though in all honesty, NTP is mostly fine for datacenter deployments where clocks are usually within nanoseconds of each other, so you can use a timestamp with microsecond precision and probably be fine.
> Here’s a polished section you can insert into your article (it fits naturally after the Sync Phase section):
briandw•3mo ago