I’m assuming you mean total order in a synchronized system. As soon as you introduce concurrency, max(seen) followed by a tie break is no longer guaranteed to b

I’m assuming you mean total order in a synchronized system. As soon as you introduce concurrency, max(seen) followed by a tie break is no longer guaranteed to be eventually consistent. Nodes can disagree on the order of past events; to put it another way, their histories will have diverged.