[tschottdorf]

Yes, if your timestamp is far enough in the past (this is determined by the maximum clock offset configured for the cluster), and if you don't collide with writes of a long-running transaction (which may run at a timestamp that could influence what you read), you will not have to worry about contention. What you're suggesting are definitely options for reading consistent, if slightly out of date, information from a hot keyspace. There's a blog post on time travel queries, which conveniently expose the required functionality as specified by the SQL standard.