Thanks for your comments, I think you understand more than you think you do but anyway I'm glad you're reading these, your contributions are very useful.

Absolutely, I read the HashGraph whitepaper a couple of times last week and have been considering engineering it from the information in the paper alone. I need to look at the legality of this first, they are totally the kind of company to lawyer up over something like that, but it might be fine to craft a solution inspired by their public research.

So in that case every node would know the correct timestamp to use without asking anyone else, because they would be synced already by previous transactions, recorded in the gossip-on-the-gossip system. I agree, it seems like the perfect solution, I have some newer plans based on it and I'll do a post on it soon, probably after I have done some testing.