> I never understood how these time stamps are trusted and reliable. I guess for difficulty adjustment purposes, that's not a hard requirement, it'd be closer

> I never understood how these time stamps are trusted and reliable. I guess for difficulty adjustment purposes, that's not a hard requirement, it'd be closer to "plausible and consensus agreed timestamps". It doesn't matter much if a bad actor can try to slightly influence the raising or lowering of difficulty, so long as the long-term once every ten minutes "clock tick" holds and can be used to define transaction ordering.