I'm not criticising it for being the same as everyone else. I'm just not sure how the whole thing works. I don't see enough information provided on the site, yet a lot of statements about providing full ACID and scalability.

re 1) and 2). I think they are related. The serialization can be done on account level. There is no need to have a single global write lock. This also implies that if the bank account transfers are typicaly to different accounts the serialization will be as often as the aborts. Hence very rare and the system will perform equally good in both cases. However, the serialization does not require further retries and doesn't force the application programmers to workaround the problems.