I really love the bee analogy, but i’m not sure if it’s a good fit for secure systems. Even among ants (who use pheromones like bees to identify kin), there is always room for an invader who has taken the time to learn the signiature of the clone and mimics it: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3906017/
and as far as I can tell, the similarity aspect isn’t all it takes for trust. Even among coloies of identical ants, there are cheaters.
In social spiders, there’s some research that suggests that signaling genetic similarity may act as a way to set up a feedback loop favoring social cooperation.
“ In the face of this temptation to cheat, how do the spiders manage to eat anything at all? This is a perennial question faced by biologists who seek to understand the evolution of cooperation: why work together, when cheating often yields greater rewards?” http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2008/07/21/social-spiders-do-better-when-hunting-with-relatives/
It’s also worth noting that the quorum sensing of bees during hive selection is a very slow processes and as such is weighted to the “accuracy” end of things, speed is sometimes more important and swarms will often choose other means when speed is important. It’s really fascinating and might be universal principle.
BTW: a better fit for your census example is how ants and bees use their social stomach as a sort of distributed immune system to fight off disease. No one ant needs to house the complete information of all the viruses to defend against, but anti-infection agents can be spread quickly thru the colony via trophallaxis. There is a simlar system in our own immune system works, and interestingly is also a process replicated by the way we ‘gossip’ reputation around.
This might work well in small groups where social norms can enforce trust and a general consensus of the group’s goals can be arranged and there exists a shared incentive. A bee without it’s hive, while they exist, take on a bigger risk by going alone. Their success depends on the spatial properties of resources and wither the successful defenses against predation require a hive. In terms of using money, the big win monetary process has is that it scales — acting as a sort of proxy for that signal of kinship and allows for mixed motives in a decentralized fashion. In effect, money becomes a sort of culturally agreed upon scalable proxy for reputation and signaling.
