In a meeting room outside Paris, dozens of people raised their hands and did away with the act of “adding a second.”
Since 1972, humanity has done it twenty-seven times. The last time was on New Year’s Eve 2016. That day, the whole world got an extra 23:59:60.
Just one second. And then it was gone. Atomic clocks tick too steadily; the Earth doesn’t rotate steadily enough. When the two don’t match, we have to make up the difference. They announce six months in advance which day the second will be added.
Sounds like a small thing. It’s caused real problems. When that second was added in 2012, a bunch of websites crashed, an Australian airline’s booking system was down for most of the day, and its customer service lines wouldn’t go through. In 2016, the same story played out again.
Google simply smeared that second across an entire day, adding a tiny bit to each time interval. Stock exchanges took a more blunt approach: they stopped accepting orders during that sixty-second minute.
A lot of people think time is measured. Actually, it’s negotiated. Whoever maintains the clock gets to say whether that second counts.
At this meeting, the tolerance was expanded from 0.9 seconds to 3,600 seconds. A full hour. From now on, official clocks can drift out of sync with the sun; they’ll talk about it once the discrepancy has built up enough. The end of leap seconds is set for May 20, 2027.
Why the rush? The Earth has been spinning faster in recent years, so the next adjustment might not be adding a second, but subtracting one. We’ve never done that before. There’s no past experience to draw on, and the hardware and software have barely been tested. The metrology bureau itself says operators are “basically not prepared.”
With an extra second, a program just has to count one more. With a second taken away, you have to make a second hand that’s been moving forward the whole time jump back one tick. Anyone who’s written code knows going backward is harder than going forward.
On-chain, there’s no such problem. No need for it.
Bitcoin block timestamps are filled in by miners. Consensus only enforces two rules: the timestamp must be later than the median time of the previous eleven blocks, and it must not be more than two hours ahead of the network time recognized by the node. The number they enter is rough anyway; nobody cares if it’s off by an hour or so.
Ethereum makes it even simpler. One slot every twelve seconds. The slot number is just a sequence number; it has nothing to do with how fast the Earth is spinning.
So leap seconds have never happened on-chain. In all these years. Not once.
Doesn’t that mean on-chain time is wildly inaccurate? It is. It only guarantees order, not that it lines up with the sun. But noon was never what it needed.
When the order you place on a decentralized exchange expires, when your lending position gets liquidated, when a whitelist opens for a rush—all of it is in its hands. A one-hour difference doesn’t affect ordering, but saying “at this exact time” becomes meaningless.
I’ve been thinking about something else. The real meaning of this vote is that official time has publicly acknowledged for the first time that it doesn’t have to be tied to the sun. On-chain systems have been doing that all along; nobody ever gave them a resolution saying so.
Why should time, defined by observatories for hundreds of years, ultimately be changed by a vote at a meeting? Because time has never been a thing of nature. It’s a ledger we all sign together. The more people who sign, the more solid it is. When the signers scatter, it’s not even a reference anymore.
There’s no definite answer on what year we’ll actually subtract a second. The International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service gives a probability: thirty percent, around 2035.
Next time someone tells you on-chain time can’t be trusted, you can reply: Greenwich time was voted into existence, too.
I now think of block time as a sequence number, not a clock. That’s the only thing that changed for me after reading that resolution.
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Since 1972, humanity has done it twenty-seven times. The last time was on New Year’s Eve 2016. That day, the whole world got an extra 23:59:60.
Just one second. And then it was gone. Atomic clocks tick too steadily; the Earth doesn’t rotate steadily enough. When the two don’t match, we have to make up the difference. They announce six months in advance which day the second will be added.
Sounds like a small thing. It’s caused real problems. When that second was added in 2012, a bunch of websites crashed, an Australian airline’s booking system was down for most of the day, and its customer service lines wouldn’t go through. In 2016, the same story played out again.
Google simply smeared that second across an entire day, adding a tiny bit to each time interval. Stock exchanges took a more blunt approach: they stopped accepting orders during that sixty-second minute.
A lot of people think time is measured. Actually, it’s negotiated. Whoever maintains the clock gets to say whether that second counts.
At this meeting, the tolerance was expanded from 0.9 seconds to 3,600 seconds. A full hour. From now on, official clocks can drift out of sync with the sun; they’ll talk about it once the discrepancy has built up enough. The end of leap seconds is set for May 20, 2027.
Why the rush? The Earth has been spinning faster in recent years, so the next adjustment might not be adding a second, but subtracting one. We’ve never done that before. There’s no past experience to draw on, and the hardware and software have barely been tested. The metrology bureau itself says operators are “basically not prepared.”
With an extra second, a program just has to count one more. With a second taken away, you have to make a second hand that’s been moving forward the whole time jump back one tick. Anyone who’s written code knows going backward is harder than going forward.
On-chain, there’s no such problem. No need for it.
Bitcoin block timestamps are filled in by miners. Consensus only enforces two rules: the timestamp must be later than the median time of the previous eleven blocks, and it must not be more than two hours ahead of the network time recognized by the node. The number they enter is rough anyway; nobody cares if it’s off by an hour or so.
Ethereum makes it even simpler. One slot every twelve seconds. The slot number is just a sequence number; it has nothing to do with how fast the Earth is spinning.
So leap seconds have never happened on-chain. In all these years. Not once.
Doesn’t that mean on-chain time is wildly inaccurate? It is. It only guarantees order, not that it lines up with the sun. But noon was never what it needed.
When the order you place on a decentralized exchange expires, when your lending position gets liquidated, when a whitelist opens for a rush—all of it is in its hands. A one-hour difference doesn’t affect ordering, but saying “at this exact time” becomes meaningless.
I’ve been thinking about something else. The real meaning of this vote is that official time has publicly acknowledged for the first time that it doesn’t have to be tied to the sun. On-chain systems have been doing that all along; nobody ever gave them a resolution saying so.
Why should time, defined by observatories for hundreds of years, ultimately be changed by a vote at a meeting? Because time has never been a thing of nature. It’s a ledger we all sign together. The more people who sign, the more solid it is. When the signers scatter, it’s not even a reference anymore.
There’s no definite answer on what year we’ll actually subtract a second. The International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service gives a probability: thirty percent, around 2035.
Next time someone tells you on-chain time can’t be trusted, you can reply: Greenwich time was voted into existence, too.
I now think of block time as a sequence number, not a clock. That’s the only thing that changed for me after reading that resolution.
$BTC $ETH $LINK #比特币 #区块链