We are using Instant::now() and Tai64::now() directly in the block producer, rather than having some time interface

[MitchTurner]

Time is unreliable IO. We should be able to isolate an manipulate it using a fake/mock rather than being dependent on the system clock.

    fn extract_block_info(last_block: &BlockHeader) -> (BlockHeight, Tai64, Instant) {
        let last_timestamp = last_block.time();
        let duration_since_last_block =
            Duration::from_secs(Tai64::now().0.saturating_sub(last_timestamp.0));
        let last_block_created = Instant::now()
            .checked_sub(duration_since_last_block)
            .unwrap_or(Instant::now());
        let last_height = *last_block.height();
        (last_height, last_timestamp, last_block_created)
    }

[MitchTurner]

It seems like we have introduced unnecessary complexity into the code to accommodate manual block production, where we should be able to just advance fake time in our tests.

[netrome]

Note, the provided code snippet is from the PoA consensus provider (crates/services/consensus_module/poa/src/service.rs) and not the block producer (crates/services/producer/src/block_producer.rs). The block producer only seems to have this problem for the dry_run functionality, and takes the time as input in all other cases, so I will focus on doing this for the consensus provider.