Time is set correctly. System time is accurate to within 250ms of several stratum 2 / stratum 3 NTP servers.
(Local NY timezone selected under windows control panel, hardware clock is NOT set to UTC because that's not how NT 6.1, 6.0, 5.1, 5.0, 4.0 or any version of windows handles such things)
This bug probably also affects other versions of windows as well.
Edit @laanwj: renamed to make clear this is not a problem with timezone detection or windows
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2800213
Workaround registry setting to force UTC hardware clock caused at least one bug as recently as Feb 2013 ... this sort of thing really isn't supported by microsoft.
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commit/8686f6467c9db2606706baca33842c97ff7621f8
Current version as found in 0.8.5 assumes:
static int64 nTimeOffset = 0;
followed immediately by dummy function which returns that hardcoded value:
int64 GetTimeOffset()
{
return nTimeOffset;
}
Some poorly (not at all) commented code follows a "humorous" comment:
//
// "Never go to sea with two chronometers; take one or three."
// Our three time sources are:
// - System clock
// - Median of other nodes clocks
// - The user (asking the user to fix the system clock if the first two disagree)
//
All of this code was in util.cpp, and I couldn't make sense of the purpose of large portions of how or why "zero" was hardcoded in so many places (mainly from the lack of comments)
nTimeOffset is not a hardcoded value, it is adjusted based on the time reported by your network peers.
And I don't think this is a Windows issue-- I saw the same thing happen on my OSX machine yesterday when I first connected, most likely caused by connecting to peers that either have their time set incorrectly accidentally (did daylight savings time start or stop somewhere recently?) or on purpose.
See my comments on #bitcoin-dev around 11:43 pacific.
Did someone rename this issue? I was coming back to try and review the status, but found that the title no longer mentioned windows... what happened? Did I just remember wrong?
As this is not a windows specific issue, I edited the title and also added a message to the opening post.
Acking the discussion on freenode in #bitcoin-dev, ongoing at this time.<br>(at or around 11:37 Local NY time, 2014 July 14)
Is this even a bug on our side? The only thing I see that can be done is to change the warning message http://bitcoinstats.com/irc/bitcoin-dev/logs/2014/07/14#l1405352477.0
I don't actually know if this is an ongoing issue, since I haven't used bitcoin in a long time (been something like 2 years now)
If someone has additional information about the issue or knows if there was a change made to the behavior, feel free to update or close #2990 as appropriate. I don't have any relevant/recent knowledge, regardless of what happens here.