Why we wait in lines?

Every day we can observe human self-organisation. People happily wait in lines, help others, return lost items and are generally friendly. All of this without hoping for a direct compensation from the others and without fearing punsihment. Especially since most of these people are complete strangers.

people self-organising in lines in rebel controlled east ukraine

What is the reason for this behaviour? Is there a law to wait in lines or otherwise be punished by the police? No, at least in most countries I hope. It is a self-regulating process of finding rules without there needing to be a ruler. Everyone knows that the alternative to lines is chaos and that everyone will be worse of in that case. We decide for the only reasonable alternative, first come first served. A protocol that every participant can independently verify and that provides a simple and logical criterium. I could go on discussing the properties of this system, such as you not even needing to verify every newcomer, but only a few people ahead of you and more.

But the crucial point is that without any external rules and without an external threat of punishment (apart from angry people shouting at you), an organised system appears. The same applies for example for returning found items (even though there is certainly a larger part of people that will keep them).

In fact this is also the case for many things we attribute to the law and the police. The reason there is no widespread theft is not that there is a punishment if caught. It is that natural human organisation does value property. The same even applies to capital crimes such as murder.

Rules and organisation can be enforced by a central authority, but they do not need to. Decentralised peer-to-peer protocols that reward honest participation can do the same and always have done and still do so. Rules without rulers, organisation without corruption. With blockchain technology we are not finding something entirely new, we are only massively extending the possible applications of open p2p protocols.

A lot of the benefits of human organisation are not brought to us by the state, but are in fact are a natural consequence of human interaction. The state only claims them to seem more important and let us pay for something that we already have. If there would be a politician running a campaign on securing the waiting lines and then taking money from us so there is a guard making sure nobody cheats, then we would say that guy is crazy. Yet we accept the same so easily for many other challenges.