--progress-timestamp is supposed to make -P report a Unix Epoch time stamp, for easy correlation with the entries in other log files (like the postgres server log file using %n).
But that broke in this commit: commit 1d63f7d2d180c8708bc12710254eb7b45823440f Author: Tom Lane <t...@sss.pgh.pa.us> Date: Mon Jan 2 13:41:51 2017 -0500 Use clock_gettime(), if available, in instr_time measurements. The commit before that one changed pgbench to make it tolerate the change in clock, but it overlooked --progress-timestamp. Cheers, Jeff