A clarification on the perpetual discussion of Bitcoin’s timestamp

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Time stamping is just one convenient way of <strong>ordering transactions</strong> in traditional consensus systems. When running a banking business, the bank wants to know, which transaction came first and which came after. Some kind of ordering is needed, whether it is a timestamp or simply an incremented number. Yet, in distributed ledger technology (DLT) and its new kind of consensus mechanisms it is quite different and challenging on how to deal with ordering. It is not sufficient to rely on NTP (Network Time Protocol) servers, atomic clocks and similar time services, since it brings in the centralised flavour and introduces single points of failures.<br>When <a href="https://hackernoon.com/tagged/bitcoin" target="_blank">Bitcoin </a>— as the most prominent example of distributed ledger technology — and its underlying <a href="https://hackernoon.com/tagged/blockchain" target="_blank">blockchain</a> concept was released, they designed the <strong>ordering</strong> as an <strong>intrinsic feature</strong>. The ordering is basically the sequential “chain” part of the blockchain itself, since one block comes after the other.