Thanks for the comment! Actually I don't fully oversee which situations will have impact for coutners (except for reads, for which it is obvious). I read that counters use some mechanism similar to vector clocks in any case. A _strongly_ consistent read on counters _requires_ consistency level ALL for counters (not only Quorum) which indeed imposes a problem in case of node failures, but clients will be notified because the read will fail. So you are right in requesting to be able to pass in the consistency level if we insist on strong consistency (done). I think https://issues.apache.org/jira/secure/attachment/12459754/Partitionedcountersdesigndoc.pdf is a good reference, although i haven't fully read it.