> If they do "abolish" leap-seconds, they have to "abolish" UTC as well, because UTC is defined based on leap-seconds. Any new timescale without leap-seconds ne

> If they do "abolish" leap-seconds, they have to "abolish" UTC as well, because UTC is defined based on leap-seconds. Any new timescale without leap-seconds needs a new name. Otherwise you get the same problem we made with GMT: "Do you mean 14:03 UTC before 2035, or 14:03 UTC after 2035 If they just stopped adding leap seconds to UTC at some point, why would there be any ambiguity about the definition of any given UTC time? > So lets call the new timescale NTS. Lots of records and timestamps have been made using UTC. So now we'll need a way of converting timestamps between UTC and NTS. We already have future timestamps in UTC; e.g. "This record must be destroyed at midnight UTC, Jan 1 2036". So even after we've switched to NTS, we'll still need to calculate UTC, so we'll still need leap-second announcements. The schedule of leap seconds in the future isn't known, so such a timestamp isn't precisely defined yet anyway. Abolishing the practice fixes this.