[stephen]

> Instead there is a protocol of credits and debits and a settlement process to work out the exceptions.

Exactly--the ecosystem as a whole is BASE, but the individual systems are ACID, and the "eventual consistency" aspect is implemented as first-class logic in applications/processes.

I think BASE is a good ecosystem-level principle, but when it gets into datastores, then each individual system doesn't know what it's true opinion of the world is, much less how it can effectively coordinate with other similarly potentially confused systems.