Let’s say you wanted to build a decentralized Facebook, Github, Gather.town, or other complex application as a decentralized protocol. Normally, you might write a protocol from scratch, copy your data to a network like IPFS, or put everything on a blockchain. Instead, a decentralized database could keep your users’ data signed, indexed, and organized.

Suppose you and I each have a local key/value store. We suspect our key/value stores have mostly the same contents, but that there might be a few differences: a couple entries that you have that I don’t, that I have that you don’t, or conflicting values for the same key. What’s the best way for us to compare the content of our databases and identify the differences?