[mlmilleratmit]

There is indeed a deterministic but arbitrary choice of the "winner", but there is a big difference with other systems -- no data is discarded. The hash tree branches and both edits are saved. You can choose which branch of the tree you want to start editing, and you can listen to a feed for documents that have conflicting edits and resolve them according to your application logic. The real choice is to never discard data.