Same Cart, Two Phones

During a network partition, a user edits the same shopping-cart key from a laptop and a phone, each write coordinated by a different node. After the partition heals, a read arrives. What does vector clock versioning let the store do?

Keep the version whose counters sum to the larger total, since more increments means more recent causal activity

Compare the clocks, see that neither dominates, and return both versions as siblings for the application to reconcile

Compare the two wall-clock timestamps and keep the later write, since the losing edit is by definition the older intent

Merge the two carts automatically into a union, because vector clocks encode how divergent values should be combined