Agreed, and I actually share the same view about "UUID" as a named concept itself. I wrote more in another comment, but in summary * Using uncoordinated random

Agreed, and I actually share the same view about "UUID" as a named concept itself. I wrote more in another comment, but in summary * Using uncoordinated random generation in a large address space for IDs is often a very useful idea * 128 bits is a good rule of thumb for "will never ever collide" * Making this into a heavyweight "UUID" concept, with it's own bespoke string format, and 7 different standard ways to generate them, feels like a ridiculous waste of cognitive effort that makes such a simple concept appear opaque and magic. If you want to encode other data (timestamp, node ID) in 16 bytes you can still do that of course. There's no need for anyone else to even know. Just do some quick calculations to ensure you haven't eliminated too much entropy