Thanks, what confuses me though is why you must retain n/2 hosts, and not be able to recover at least in many cases from a loss down to a single host. I understand that a known majority insures that a write will always persist/propagate even after a network segmentation and later re-join. But what if the network isn't segmented but the servers are simply down, or there wouldn't be a conflict regardless because the relevant clients couldn't have written to the segmented network anyway? When they rejoin they would all know they are behind the one that remained online (as one does with version clocks), so they could just get all missing events and be consistent again.

The majority requirement would, seems to me, reduce reliability over the ability to failover down to a single server.

Does anyone know of a list or test suite of all failures that a consistency algorithm is resistant too, then at least I could understand the reasoning. I get the impression that there are a lot of failure modes that are handled at some cost, but are not relevant to my use cases.