> So something that's unique is NOW() (assuming low enough sample rate LOL) and something that never changes is a laser serial number, concatenate those and ram

> So something that's unique is NOW() (assuming low enough sample rate LOL) and something that never changes is a laser serial number, concatenate those and ram thru a hash to make it small and fit. That sounds very similar to UUID version 1 except that you replaced MAC address with some other identifier and added a hashing step.