timestamps and contexts

[wizzard]

Why should each timestamp have a context?

Timestamp represents a shorthand for the state of the world up to that instant in time. That's fine unless you factor in latency. Even assuming you know the time perfectly - you still know only so much about distant objects.

No, this is not about the speed of light. This is about mundane things like "balance sheets are updated each month".

So you can of course ignore the context most of the time (if the correctness criteria in your system are implied)

But if you want to be more precise, or when you need to reify those criteria and estimate the error margin - then you need context. This may be anything like node ID, GPS location, machine name, whatever - as long as you can impose a total order (partial order may be enough too) on events recorded with that context.

The intuition behind vector clocks is the same, I suspect.