The hardest part of building a P2P Bitcoin market isn't the software
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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