Quote from: gmaxwell on December 31, 2013, 01:04:52 PM

Quote from: crabel on December 31, 2013, 12:36:57 AM

Thank you all for that information. There are ways of resolving the timestamp in a decentralized manner.

"Ways"
...

Miners express their own local view of the time in the timestamps, subject to some constraints of plausibility that don't endanger the decentralized nature of the system.

I got a chuckle out of this too (can't be too haughty because I'm no expert myself.) I'm not sure exactly what crabel was saying here*, but a peer-to-peer proof-of-work hash chain that incorporates timestamps that are supposed to be within some bounds to be part of the winning chain, IS A "way of resolving the timestamp in a decentralized manner."

If you think the clock is wrong, or not monotonic enough, take it up with the entire bitcoin network. They effectively approve each timestamp as it comes in, by starting another block on top. Sorry, but I don't think they care much about your analytics. I started this thought as a joke, but seriously, if you think it's a big deal and think everyone will agree, the window could be made stricter. But I am pretty sure keeping an accurate clock is pretty much the last thing anybody is going to risk orphaning their mined coins for, or having their transactions reversed or delayed over. The bitcoin network does not have accurate timestamps as a design goal.

*It sounded like he may have been describing a way he normalizes the timestamp for his purpose, but I'm not sure.