I had to make that distinction fairly early on wether PouchDB would be an edge client or a full node and I decided full node, tradeoffs either way but pros of b

I had to make that distinction fairly early on wether PouchDB would be an edge client or a full node and I decided full node, tradeoffs either way but pros of being a full node: 1. Additional (p2p) use cases, honestly I dont use CouchDB much these days, I use express-pouchdb-server so I can embed pouchdb into my server easier than any other database, there is also pouchdb-server and p2p projects like Thali (http://thaliproject.org/ http://thaliproject.org/) 2. CouchDB existed, sync is super hard, writing an edge client would have meant designing it myself, writing a couchdb clone meant I needed to make a lot less decisions about how it worked while being very confident it would work, The test suite runs the same tests against pouchdb/couchdb to ensure compatibility (and replication via each configuration)