(Cockroach Labs CTO) The major issue with clock offsets is stale reads due to the time-based read lease. Pretty much everything else is independent of the clocks. Stale reads are still enough to get you in trouble (some of the jepsen tests will show serializability violations if you disable the clock-offset suicide and mess with the clocks enough), but it's tricky to actually get bad data written into the database, as opposed to returning a stale-but-consistent view of the data.