[querulous]

using the monotonic clock api may not actually be an improvement. that gets you deterministic ordering on a single node but increases possible clock skew (you will still see clock drift but it will now be clamped limiting the ability to bring it back in sync)

also note that you need deterministic ordering over the cluster and deterministic ordering on individual nodes does not actually grant you any greater certainty

i believe you're referring to google's chubby lock system with your reference to gps but the clocks were only used as an optimization in chubby, it still had to implement a consensus protocol