That's part of the point he's making, though. To reject this case in a distributed database needs some additional concepts. From the article: > Whichever trans

That's part of the point he's making, though. To reject this case in a distributed database needs some additional concepts. From the article: > Whichever transaction is second --- when it reads the balance --- it must read the value written by the first transaction. Attar et. al. named this guarantee “one copy serializability” or “1SR”, because the isolation guarantee is equivalent to serializability in an unreplicated system with “one copy” of every data item. Your point about archiving logs assumes there is one log of transactions, which isn't true in general in distributed databases (although something equivalent to one log needs to exist for 1SR).