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jasode

Fyi... the keyword "CRDT" appears 50 times in the article.

Some past HN threads mentioning CRDT did not fare as well as OT (Operational Transform):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19886883

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19847622

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Because CRDTs are one of Martin Kleppmann's group main research interests (and a key mechanism in achieving local-first applications that synchronize seamlessly).

Just a few weeks ago he released a video that explains CRDTs in a bit more detail:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23802208

Yea sure, CRDTs interesting and all, but what if it mentioned blackchain 50 times? Research groups often worship a particular technology for some imaginary practical applications. Take something like collaborative editing, It's "straightforward" to have a people edit a local document and then use a server as the central point of authority, but that is not an open academic question so people want to do it without the central server. Marijn Haverbeke has made this point more eleganty [1].

[1] https://marijnhaverbeke.nl/blog/collaborative-editing.html

I've more than a passing interest in these technologies. Specifically, CRDTs was a bad fit for Xi (that's called out in those articles too -- but people perhaps give too much notice only to the headline).

CRDTs absolutely are a level above OTs, except seen lesser adoption, because they're newer, and the libraries and frameworks around it are maturing. It is inherently more scalable (data store/caches are simple pub/subs and queues).

These open up quite a few usecases for applications - offline first is now a real technological possiblity, as the main deterrent (conflicts) has been algorithmically addressed.

The cons are non-technological : commercial operations have no incentive to support losing control of the data. For those that can get past this archaic roadblock, the pro is amazing - enabling true collaboration at every level of the application. These would be the killer apps here!

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