system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Does an electric current take time to accelerate?

Also, does it lag further down the wire from where the difference of potential starts? If these things happen, does that ever make a difference in circuitry?
gpt
Yes, yes, and yes.

Propagation of changes in electric potential is limited by the speed of light, and so even under theoretically optimal conditions, the earliest time when electrons would get moving is (their distance from the initial change in electric potential) / (speed of light).

Similarly, acceleration of electrons is not instantaneous, and the processes that generate free electrons (chemical processes in a battery, or electromagnetic processes in a transformer) also do not occur instantaneously.

Between the delayed imposed by theoretical physics and the delays imposed by practical engineering, relationship between potential and current in real circuits is considerably more complex than you might think.

Finally, yes, this makes a huge difference in circuitry.

One the one end of the spectrum, CPU design these days is partially limited by speed-of-light constraints on propagation.

On the other end of the spectrum, power supply design is hard due to various engineering and theoretical constraints. Noisy output from power supplies can cause all sorts of weird problems (for example, if you plug a touch phone into a crappy charger, fluctuations in the current and voltage supplied by the charger can cause your touchscreen to be unusable while charging).