The significance I think is: If it is indeed the case that the higher value is always *in fact* correct, I think that's inconsistent with the hypothesis that unclean shutdown is the sole cause of these problems - as long as the client is truly submitting non-idempotent counter increments without a read-before-write.
As a side note: If hou're using these counters for stuff like determining amounts of money to be payed by somebody, consider the non-idempotense of counter increments. Any write that increments a counter, that fails by e.g. Timeout *MAY OR MAY NOT* have been applied and cannot be safely retried. Cassandra counters are generally not useful if *strict* correctness is desired, for this reason. -- / Peter Schuller (@scode, http://worldmodscode.wordpress.com)
