Snowflake was 63 bits due to some cleverness with resetting the epoch and coordinating unique worker ID's through Zookeeper. These Flakes relax those restricti

Snowflake was 63 bits due to some cleverness with resetting the epoch and coordinating unique worker ID's through Zookeeper. These Flakes relax those restrictions and are 128 bits. The benefit is that they don't require a central server to distribute worker ID's and the epoch is the standard Unix epoch. This holds as long as the MAC addresses on your machines are unique. As another commenter mentioned, this doesn't always happen.