This issues are in the context of distributed systems where you want to be able to recover from losing a receiver (f.ex., we want to be able to reassign partiti

This issues are in the context of distributed systems where you want to be able to recover from losing a receiver (f.ex., we want to be able to reassign partitions for a Kafka topic when a consumer goes down). If you don't mind your system grinding to a halt whenever you lose one of your receivers (that's perfectly fine in some circumstances!), then your proposed solution works great. Edit: also, i should be fair and acknowledge that you're effectively describing idempotency (i'm guessing you already knew that ;P ), which the article's author eventually points out is a way to recover "exactly-once" semantics. The point, maybe, is that someone needs to explicitly do this somewhere; you can't really rely on your protocol to do it for you.