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Yes, Mostro is actually one of the experiments I had in mind.
And I think your concern about consolidation is the important one.
Having a protocol that allows anyone to run a coordinator doesn't automatically give you decentralization. If eventually most liquidity and users converge around a handful of well-known coordinators, you've recreated obvious pressure points — just at a different layer.
The interesting outcome would be exactly what you describe: hundreds or thousands of coordinators, where spinning up a new one is cheap, permissionless and normal, and losing one doesn't really matter to the network.
Whether users and liquidity naturally converge instead is probably the real experiment.
Maybe the hardest part isn't making P2P permissionless at the protocol level. It's preventing convenience, reputation and liquidity from centralizing it again at the social layer.
Having a protocol that allows anyone to run a coordinator doesn't automatically give you decentralization.
Exactly. For mostro, I was thinking that in theory we can push this concept a little on the client-side (on an alt client maybe) because I think that the coordinator can be abstracted away in the orderbook as an entrypoint, and instead make it a re-ranker dimension. Could even WoT that to some extent.
I need my stats tool to work though - and that's not done - because I want to have a better idea about what's really happening and am curious how many of those announced coordinators are actually serving trades - and how many are self-dealing (i.e. trading on their own coordinator, because that would be crap in terms of dispute resolution)
As long as you're not named in some investigation, and generally fly under the radar, you're fine. But once the pressure starts, you better have had your lobbyists embedded for years, or you'll be under reassessment the moment the first complaint lands. Someone signed off on your permission slip and that someone will be targeted too.
I basically use this argument when discussing the LN banks too (because it's the same weakness): "you as a user get convenience, until you don't." Often things aren't enforced early on or even given a chance formally like in the Peach case, but even if your behavior didn't change, your userbase will grow more diverse and the narrative, spread between your users, does too. If you have an exception to your name it will be abused. You're the loophole. This will often catch up, unless you become part of their system - and even then, you can still be the sacrificial lamb because you exist by their consent, not because you are just a fact they have to deal with.
I've seen this happen first-hand in the compliant Bitcoin space of older times, and it doesn't really change, because that's the system. The system we didn't really like back in the day. Sometimes I wonder if the younger generations of Bitcoiners understand the position of not using banks, or that it is some foreign thing to them, because they weren't there before the boom. I guess that that makes everyone that was around a decade or more ago, a boomer.
Like mostro? If it doesn't consolidate and there will be a thousand coordinators, it'd be awesome. I think it'll consolidate though. Then we'll need something without any for-purpose coordination at all. Will be good fun to "make bitcoin p2p again".