Bitcoin Forum

I sent $100 cash to Morpheus to convert into MtGox $, but it never arrived.  I mailed it from a public mail box, so it wasn't stolen out of mine.

I can't think of a time that I've ever had first-class mail get lost before.

Did you use USPS delivery notification?

The lost cash was very unfortunate. I've received cash from several others without incident. The cash from FlyingMoose simply did not show up. I'm not sure what happened. If FlyingMoose still want's to use my service, I'll wave my fee until it covers his loss.

I'm thinking of accepting postal money orders and checks in the mail which is much safer than cash. If the money order or check is lost in the mail, it can't be cashed by anyone else (not without difficulty) and the sender can simply cancel it and get their money back.

The only issue I seem to find with money orders and checks is fakes and bounced checks. Both seem to be easy to avoid by waiting for them to clear before sending bitcoin/Mt. Gox USD.

Are there any other issues I should be worried about? Anyone on this board have experience accepting checks in the mail for hard goods?

Missing mail is rare indeed.

More often is misdirected mail that is delivered or returned very late.

Don't give up on it yet.

Theft of mail obviously containing cash or other valuables is not unheard of...

I recently had a piece of mail show up 5 months late.

Sometimes envelopes get jammed in the line. Once they are torn open, the inspector has to approve the re-packing. That can take months.

The key operators make mistakes. Did you know there is a small town in Kansas called Canada? lol

I've seen stuff returned for no good reason at all, months later. Very mysterious.

On more than one occasion I've had very late mail delivered with cash hanging out or visible in the clear re-packing used by the inspectors after the automated line has chewed up a letter.

People sometimes wrap cash up in lumps that will jam the line. Auto mail must be able to roll around a wheel 15 cm in diameter.

In Canada and USA the sender can pay for "tray sorting", which is done manually, by affixing double postage. Two stamp mail can therefore have bumps or odd shapes and weigh up to 50 grams.

The mail systems of the Western countries are incredibly reliable with England and Italy being exceptions. (The Royal Mail is fixing their problem and Italy north has always been good).

In contrast, some national postal systems are worse than a joke. In fact, one I heard recently goes like this, "How do they dispose of toxic waste in Zimbabwe?"
A: Put it in the mail.

By far and away the biggest problem I see in the mails is the dumfuk syndrome. Many people have become so stupid they can't properly address a letter anymore.

Oh, while I am ranting away about dumfuk syndrome, I want to rail on some web authors. Here are some fun facts to help get you mind unbound.

1) Only one country in the world calls their postal codes "zip".
2) only 2 countries in the world use a 5 digit numeric format.
3) together these two countries account for less than 5% of the people in the world.

So, when you make a web form that insists on a "zip" code being 5 numbers long, you have broken your form to 95% of the world.

To those who think this is unimportant I say, if you wanted to author for the USA-wide-web, you should have made that left turn at Albuquerque, Bugs, because this here is the WORLD wide web.

You're not kidding! Every month I receive a few letters that should have been delivered to someone else.

Here's a 2004 article describing the problems:
Royal Mail 'loses 14.4m letters' (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3681547.stm)

Having said that, my mail to morpheus has always been received.

This cracks me up;


Whatever you do, don't blurt out the ugly truth!