Thank you for the observations. They are most helpful and will assist the participants in the exercise better understand distributed systems.
The important point on the clones is that a bee clone can “trust” the behaviour of another clone because it is a clone. I am not sure what bees do with a bee if it acts in unexpected ways but with distributed information systems we continually check to see that a “clone” keeps its promises. When it doesn’t, and if we detect it we do something about it. In the justice system, we call it a trial. Whileever unexpected behaviour is rare having trusted operations on data is lower cost than having to trust the data.
For example, in money systems, the cost of looking after money with time value is the cost of interest. If we remove the time value of money by changing the algorithm for making a loan, then we do not have the cost of looking after the money tokens because we know they do not increase in value over time. We only have to make sure the transfer is OK — and we already have systems in place to do that. The approach typically doubles the amount of money available for long term investments. It makes housing affordable and makes “free” renewable energy lower cost than systems that burn fuel.
