Depends on the problem you want to solve. CouchDB is a very good document database when you have more read than write and when writer are mostly writing on diff

Depends on the problem you want to solve. CouchDB is a very good document database when you have more read than write and when writer are mostly writing on different documents. If I understand correctly replication conflict resolution is up to the application. So knowing about consensus algo is unnecessary for CouchDB because he doesn't support it. I think it's smart to know a little about the literature; enough to know what battle you don't want to fight. It is not smart to try to develop an engine on the basis that it will need to beat the law of thermodynamic to be possible. But also, “They did not know it was impossible so they did it”, Mark Twain