[hoytschermerhrn]

Seconded, I'd love to read a whitepaper if anyone is able to provide one. I'm assuming this operates on some variant of Google's TrueTime[0].

[0] https://cloud.google.com/spanner/docs/true-time-external-con...

[foota]

Not necessarily, I think Spanner's magic is most useful for bounded staleness reads and scaling reads through non-leader replicas. Otherwise I think you're looking at normal "NewSQL" guarantees.