&gt; All the time Martin says that “the system clock jumps” I assume that we covered this by not poking with the system time in a way that is a problem for the algorithm, or for the sake of simplicity by using the monotonic time API. So:<p>&gt; About claim 1: This is not an issue, we assumed that we can count time approximately at the same speed, unless there is any actual argument against it.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aphyr.com&#x2F;posts&#x2F;299-the-trouble-with-timestamps" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aphyr.com&#x2F;posts&#x2F;299-the-trouble-with-timestamps</a><p>&gt; Timestamps, as implemented in Riak, Cassandra, et al, are fundamentally unsafe ordering constructs. In order to guarantee consistency you, the user, must ensure locally monotonic and, to some extent, globally monotonic clocks. This is a hard problem, and NTP does not solve it for you. When wall clocks are not properly coupled to the operations in the system, causal constraints can be violated. To ensure safety properties hold all the time, rather than probabilistically, you need logical clocks.<p>&gt; A somewhat less safe but reasonable option is to use NTP rigorously on your machines, and sync it to TAI or GPS instead of POSIX time or UTC. Make sure you measure your clock skew: everyone I know who says they run NTP has discovered, at one point or another, that a node was way out of sync. If you want rough correspondence to POSIX time, you can still ensure monotonicity by running your own NTP pool and slurring leap seconds over longer time frames.<p>Clock skew is a very real problem and virtually impossible to avoid 100% of the time. Particularly when you have things like leap seconds where the fundamental concept of how many seconds in a day get changed.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Leap_second" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Leap_second</a><p><i></i>System clocks are fundamentally unsafe if you just use NTP.<i></i> That isn&#x27;t to say you can never do it. Some use cases it is &quot;safe enough&quot; [e.g. Analytics, Metrics] where the occasional fuck up isn&#x27;t substantial but Antirez isn&#x27;t making that argument with Redlock as far as I can tell.<p>&gt; “Okay, so maybe you think that a clock jump is unrealistic, because you’re very confident in having correctly configured NTP to only ever slew the clock.” (Yep we agree here ;-) he continues and says…)<p>That still isn&#x27;t reliably safe because there is no guarantee all nodes will perform the slew identically.