&gt; Usually it is hard with distributed computations to say what happened before and what happened after. Using those IDs you always know the order of certain events.<p>Which &quot;certain events&quot;? The typical case I can think of wouldn&#x27;t work:<p><pre><code>    - at time t0, event e0 occurs on client c0, an id is requested
    - at time t1 &gt; t0, event e1 occurs on client c1, an id is requested
    - id1 = 62 is generated and returned to client c1
    - id0 = 63 is generated after because of network latency
</code></pre>
The IDs say that event e1 reached the ID generation servers before event e0, but I don&#x27;t see when this would be useful, e0 still happened before, it may even be causally older than e1.<p>Am I missing something?