# Step Two: Reliable Time

**URL:** <https://community.spritely.institute/t/step-two-reliable-time/641>\
**Category:** Architecture\
**Created:** [December 28, 2024, 3:10pm UTC](https://community.spritely.institute/t/step-two-reliable-time/641 "2024-12-28T15:10:12Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![MangoCats](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/flex030/user_avatar/community.spritely.institute/mangocats/32/338_2.png) [@MangoCats](https://community.spritely.institute/u/MangoCats)\
**Post date:** [December 28, 2024, 3:10pm UTC](https://community.spritely.institute/t/step-two-reliable-time/641/1 "2024-12-28T15:10:12Z")

</div>

So, abstract theorists may be able to construct secure protocols which do not rely on accurate, reliable timestamps, but even if their proofs are irrefutable, they will also have to admit: it’s easier to implement and understand these things with reliably accurate timestamps.

Reliability implies (and in a distributed open system, requires) security. Shockingly, NTS/NTP wasn’t officially adopted until 2020, but it’s there now and in the spirit of reusing well worn, well proven, widely understood protocols with many reference implementations already available, I’d say that for the initial design sketch of “a world safe for decentralized persona, communities, and anything else” RFC 8915 is a good starting point. [RFC 8915 - Network Time Security for the Network Time Protocol](https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8915)

There’s also the more capable, less widely implemented, proposed secure PTP standard: [draft-ietf-ntp-nts-for-ptp-00](https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-ntp-nts-for-ptp-00)

As with all things in a durable architecture sketch, systems should be developed in a modular fashion wherein NTS, NTS4PTP, and any other suitable protocols may be implemented alternatively or in parallel where appropriate, anything that meets the criteria of reliable/secure suitably accurate timekeeping will do.

So, any node participating in the overall federated infrastructure shall:

- securely maintain an accurate sense of time, to such precision as is appropriate for the functions being performed
- upon demand, as appropriate, provide proof to cooperating nodes of their current time value
- use (dis)provably accurate time in such protocol exchanges as benefit from accurate timestamps
- appropriately ignore, reject or flag as inaccurate any communication or record which is proven to be timestamped inaccurately

It’s a small, but important component of the infrastructure.

* * *

Obliquely applicable lyrics:

You are young and life is long  
And there is time to kill today  
And then one day you find  
Ten years have got behind you  
No one told you when to run  
You missed the starting gun

And you run, and you run  
To catch up with the sun, but it’s sinking  
And racing around  
To come up behind you again  
The sun is the same in a relative way  
But you’re older  
Shorter of breath  
And one day closer to death

Every year is getting shorter  
Never seem to find the time  
Plans that either come to naught  
Or half a page of scribbled lines  
Hanging on in quiet desperation  
Is the English way  
The time is gone, the song is over  
Thought I’d something more to say

- Pink Floyd