Earlier quoted context omitted.
Give up on the idea of "the timestamp" of an event. There is no such thing. Clocks are unreliable, and even if every clock in a system is perfectly in-sync (via atomic transponders or whatever) they're still subject to speed-of-light discrepancies that make it impossible to define "the time" of any event. Two nodes separated by 10000km require ~33ms to send information in one direction, and ~66ms to do a roundtrip. S…
> Logical ordering of events in a distributed system is a solved problem. The solution is vector clocks (or something like them). Vector clocks don't solve this problem, as they only provide a partial ordering. When multiple messages are in flight in the same 'simultaneity window', different observers may receive them in different orders and vector clocks can't determine a consistent order of those events. Vector clo…
That's right! Vector clocks only provide partial order. But partial order is the only actual truth in any distributed system. Total order is a fiction, which only exists in the context of a specific node, based on that specific node's experience of reality (message receipt).
In any non-trivial distributed system, there is no consistent (total) order of events, at least not without a consensus protocol. There are lots of ways to hack a (fake) total order, and many of those approaches are enormously successful nearly all of the time. But, still, you know.