Eventual consistency

Replicas catch up eventually. Reads in the meantime might lie a little.

Definition

A consistency model in distributed systems where, if no new writes are made, all replicas will eventually converge to the same value, but reads in between can return stale data.

Step 1

Predict first

In one or two sentences, what do you think this concept means? Wrong is fine; the small struggle is what makes the answer stick.