[lobster_johnson]

I don't see what's hand-wavy about it. He makes a clear and succinct point: In a distributed database, managing consistency at scale gets complex because most systems are designed to assume a centralized authority [of consistency]. By removing the centralized authority and making conflict resolution the main mode of operation, the design can (according to the author) be made simpler.

I don't disagree with any of that, and it's not a new idea (Lotus Notes and CouchDB come to mind as databases that solve replication through conflict handling), although I'm not seeing a clear description of how this synchronization algorithm actually works. There's a description in the wiki [1], but it's unfinished. (Looking at the code, the entire project looks like quick-and-dirty, unfinished prototype, actually.)

[1] https://github.com/amark/gun/wiki/Conflict-Resolution-with-G...

[rubiquity]

Consenus, replication and consistency are potential solutions and their own problems to another entire set of really hard problems. If you're going to say you solved them you better say how, and most importantly, what tradeoffs you made to do so.

[marknadal]

Good point, I'm definitely lacking coverage on my documentation. But we're working on it.

GUN is a AP system, so you do not get Strong (Global) Consistency, instead it is Eventually Consistent and Highly Available. For more information on this, check out the wiki: https://github.com/amark/gun/wiki/CAP-Theorem .

Basically you do NOT get linearizability for free, you have to build that ontop where it is baked explicitly into the data, with a CRDT or DAG or something. In the future, there should be extensions for this so you don't have to worry about it.