The most elegant solutions is to look at Lamport’s other papers, like Paxos or their derivatives. Tie-breaking doesn’t actually happen at the clock level, but a

The most elegant solutions is to look at Lamport’s other papers, like Paxos or their derivatives. Tie-breaking doesn’t actually happen at the clock level, but at the conflict resolution level, which is a bit higher. IIRC, paxos traditionally uses the node id as the tie-breaker, making leadership deterministic in the face of conflicts. Though in all honesty, NTP is mostly fine for datacenter deployments where clocks are usually within nanoseconds of each other, so you can use a timestamp with microsecond precision and probably be fine.