Causality is the only ordering distributed systems agree on.
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Distributed systems lose the comfort of a single timeline. Two events that happened in your wall-clock past may, from the system’s perspective, be incomparable. There is no global now to appeal to.
What survives is causality — the relation between events that one could have influenced the other. Logical clocks, vector clocks, and CRDTs are all attempts to track this thinner but more honest ordering.
Stop reasoning about distributed systems with wristwatches. Reason about them with cause and effect.
