The initial version, released in 2010, was based on Apache Thrift and it predated Finagle, their building block for RPC services at Twitter. The Snowflake they're using internally is a full rewrite and heavily relies on existing infrastructure at Twitter to run.
This reminds me a little bit of Twitter's snowflake: To generate the roughly-sorted 64 bit ids in an uncoordinated manner, we settled on a composition of: timestamp, worker number and sequence number.
Sequence numbers are per-thread and worker numbers are chosen at startup via zookeeper (though that’s overridable via a config file).
Interesting... on 2022-12-13 the bounty has been claimed! Just a few hours after mprime1 shared the project in a comment on HackerNews, someone managed to drain the BTC.
For that reason alone it seems so silly to me that Google would make this change and cause this headline to occur. Hell like the poor folks rest and vest as the worse case.
The total value of all cryptocurrencies has dropped 11 percent since Saturday, declining from a high of nearly $180 billion to under $160 billion today.
(Now my hand hurts...)