Yeah, so that's the problem we're talking about: the presentation implied that a split network can still accept writes, because one side will have a majority. B

Yeah, so that's the problem we're talking about: the presentation implied that a split network can still accept writes, because one side will have a majority. But what if neither side does? Is the cluster just in read-only mode? But, as I rephrase the problem, I think I observe that splitting the network in two is a rather general case of partitioning. If we partition each node to be on its own, then of course nobody has a majority, so an odd number of nodes doesn't solve the general partition problem.