> You just contact the central authorisation server No! No!! No!!! First, we're doing distributed computing. There is no central authorization server. There a

> You just contact the central authorisation server No! No!! No!!! First, we're doing distributed computing. There is no central authorization server. There are N authorization servers, and by the time you know for 100% sure whether the majority agree on whether you're authorized, someone has revoked the authorization. So take your authorization token, we'll write it down when you use it, and if you're de-authorized we'll adjust the counter after the fact to compensate, during our periodic audit. But more importantly, the real problem is that your counter increment message was sent to a machine that has been taken offline by an errant backhoe and we don't know whether it took. Fortunately you sent the counter-increment message to three different servers, so once we have time to go through all the counter increment messages to de-duplicate we'll have your count, and the problem today is making sure that we have a full three copies of the message stored instead of just two.