Comment by gpderetta

2 days ago

TL;DR Birthday Paradox.

tl;dr we reinvented UUID and it works well

  • Certainly not true. UUIDs have structure to them, and variants. Trace IDs are just 128-bit numbers, with any further semantics (almost) completely non-standardized (some systems encode timestamps, etc). They slapped a “last 56 bits are random” flag (not in the ID itself but as external metadata, so not like UUID at all) later giving IDs just a bit of semantics, but it’s not a reinvention of UUIDs.

    • Okay, sightly more bits than UUID v4. The whole article is merely reasoning "why at least 128 bits are required", and if you smuggle some non-random data inside these bits the entropy can only drop, making it more vulnerable to collision, i.e. inferior to UUID v4.

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