We've been trying to bootstrap liquidity for MostroEuropa from basically zero, and one thing is becoming very obvious: building the infrastructure is the easy part.
The difficult part is getting the first people to leave orders open.
A P2P market can have good software, Lightning payments, Nostr communication and people interested in the idea, but when a new user opens it and sees an empty order book, they leave. The next person does exactly the same thing.
We've had real trades now, so the market works. But most activity naturally concentrates in EUR, while getting the first GBP, CHF, PLN, CZK, HUF or other local-currency orders is much harder.
It feels like a classic chicken-and-egg problem: nobody wants to create an order because there are few users, and there are few users because there are few orders.
I'm curious how other Bitcoin P2P projects or small marketplaces have dealt with this.
What actually gets people to become makers instead of just checking whether somebody else has already created an order?
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This was downvoted 600 sats.
I'd love to hear more about WHY.
I upzapped it 512 sats. do you want hear why?
I get upzaps.
It's the downzaps...
The hard part is getting enough trustworthy buyers and sellers online at the same time, in the same place, with payment methods that work. Escrow can reduce counterparty risk, but it doesn’t solve disputes, fiat reversals, or the cold-start problem—and every “trust” feature risks turning into a centralized authority.
Which has been the biggest bottleneck in practice: liquidity, reliable payment rails, or resolving disputes without a trusted operator?