Precision vs. accuracy of System.nanoTime()

Question

The documentation for System.nanoTime() says the following (emphasis mine).

This method can only be used to measure elapsed time and is not related to

Answer 1

The first interpretation is correct. On most systems the three least-significant digits will always be zero. This in effect gives microsecond accuracy, but reports it at the fixed precision level of a nanosecond.

In fact, now that I look at it again, your second interpretation is also a valid description of what is going on, maybe even more so. Imagining freezed time, the report will be always the same wrong number of nanoseconds, but correct if understood as the integer number of microseconds.