Comment by convolvatron

yes, it can be easier to have a central serializer for events, but that certainly makes things problematic for fault tolerance and basically excludes large-scale solutions. using an agreed-upon post-hoc ordering based on timestamps is certainly another way, but really only if you're working in a paradigm that lets you impose it (like mvcc) or doesn't care (like crdt).

personally I find when you view events in a distributed system as a partial order, its more liberating than confusing. its not unusual to assume that there is some kind of canonical event ordering that we have to preserve, when its often just not semantically important. so its a useless constraint that can impose complexity and limit the solution space. the partial ordering exposes the real causal constraints.