When generated according to the standards, UUIDs are, for practical purposes, unique. Their uniqueness does not depend on a central registration authority or coordination between the parties generating them, unlike most other numbering schemes.
While the probability that a UUID will be duplicated is not zero, it is close enough to zero to be negligible.[2] Thus, anyone can create large numbers of UUIDs and use them as identifiers with near certainty that they do not duplicate UUIDs that have been, or will be, created by others, with the only coordination required to achieve uniqueness being conformance with the UUID standards.
Adoption of UUIDs is widespread, with many computing platforms providing support for generating them and for parsing their textual representation.