alt Hacker NewsI don’t understand either.
If I have three machines, all getting a slice of 300 ids each at the same time (same timestamp bits), then there is no way to tell how the total 900 ids are supposed to actually be ordered in terms of what time they happened exactly. You only know the order of each group of 300, but not how the items from the three groups interleave with each other. So then what’s the point of having the timestamp oracle in the first place?
Yes, thats the point of a global timestamp oracle- for when you require the 900 ids to be ordered globally across machines for whatever reason. Plenty of use cases/reasons (ordering transactions, maintaining global logs etc). It's the whole point of distributed systems