My overactive imagination thinks it went something like this: Engineer A: Gee, I need to store a few flags with each block, but there's nowhere to put them. Ah

My overactive imagination thinks it went something like this: Engineer A: Gee, I need to store a few flags with each block, but there's nowhere to put them. Ah! We're storing timestamps as 64-bit microseconds. I can borrow a few of those bits and there'll still be enough to go for thousands of years without overflowing. Engineer B: Gee, our SSDs are getting so fast, soon we'll be able to hit 1M writes/sec. But we're storing timestamps as microseconds. How can we generate unique timestamps for each write? Ah! I'll switch to nanoseconds. It's a good thing we have plenty of space in this 64-bit int. BOOM!