Losing the Novel

A collaborative editor models a document as a map from character index to an LWW register. Two authors work offline and each inserts a paragraph at a different point in the text. What goes wrong when their states merge?

Only the later insertion survives, because an LWW map resolves the whole document to one winning value and discards the state the other author started from

Each insertion shifts every later index, so the two edits overwrite each other's slots; a sequence CRDT gives characters stable, densely orderable identifiers instead

Nothing goes wrong: per-character LWW converges deterministically, so the merged document is a correct interleaving of both authors' paragraphs in index order

The merge is correct but expensive, since every character position carries its own timestamp and the metadata grows with the number of edits rather than the length of the text