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Why "What Happened First?" Is One of the Hardest Questions in Large-Scale Systems

Why "What Happened First?" Is One of the Hardest Questions in Large-Scale Systems

Logical clocks track event order in distributed systems—no need for synced wall clocks. Each node keeps a counter. On every event: tick it. On every message: tack on your counter. When you receive one? Merge and bump.

This flips the script. Instead of chasing global time, distributed systems lean into causality. Because actual time lies, but cause-and-effect doesn’t.


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