Ask HN: Do you have faith in any time estimating system?

Is there a good reason to force engineers to estimate how long a ticket will take to complete? Personally, 90% of the time I'm just making things up if I need to estimate how long a feature will take to implement. The only time I'm confident is if I can visualize the line of code that I know is causing a bug. In that case the ticket usually takes 5 - 10 minutes to fix. But sometimes I'm wrong, and that line is causing a problem because of a bigger flaw I didn't realize. Can I just admit I have no idea and just write down random numbers that aren't obviously wrong?

Do time estimates truly exist just to make business side employees feel good? Do you see a future where companies can negotiate funding without relying on this inherently flawed (and fraudulent?) tool?