[catwell]

They can still work, with a few changes and worse performance.

The clock is not used to say that the time is exactly the same on all nodes, it is used to guarantee that if two events have timestamps whose difference is larger than some threshold they can be ordered reliably. You don't need an atomic clock to do it, for instance CockroachDB only requires NTP, but of course, the smaller the error margin, the faster the system is.

That being said, given that speed will be limited by the distance traveled by information and the speed of light, I suppose those systems won't have much edge over purely causality-based ones. In other words, CRDTs will rule Space :)