Relatedly, Erlang's own refs aren't created by a strictly-monotonic global generator; but rather are internally a pair of a regular monotonic identifier, and th

Relatedly, Erlang's own refs aren't created by a strictly-monotonic global generator; but rather are internally a pair of a regular monotonic identifier, and the PID of the requesting process. In other words, they're akin to UUIDv1s, or to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowflake_ID https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowflake_ID s. You only really need strictly monotonic global identifiers if you need immediately-consistent first/last-write-wins. If you can instead rely on eventually-consistent first/last-write-wins (i.e. if your write events enter an event store/queue that linearizes them by ID, and then all "simultaneous" writes but the one with highest ID priority can be dropped/ignored, either during processing, or on read), then I'd recommend first considering packed (nodeID, seq) pairs. And, if you want global event orderibility, considering the snowflake ID formulation (timestampMajor, nodeID, timestampMinor, seq) specifically.