You need to get some posts under your belt first.

Really sorry to hear of your loss. Over the years I've generally had a good service from PayPal and ebay but then I suppose I've been lucky cos I've heard a lot about scams. But then you don't hear of all the successful ebay and PayPal trades.

It's tempting to sell BTC on PayPal because of the better return but that has to be balanced with the slightly extra risk. However, looking at all the alternatives (BTC-e etc) there's lots of stories of disappearing coins with them too.

Nevertheless it does make me sick to hear of people being scammed.

Where is the volatility? What's up? has BTC reached the mature  and stable status of the Swiss Franc? Where's the chop? My bots are bored!!

You can always pay in EUR or USD. You just have some exchange fees.

Trouble is the big companies dont like accepting a payment method whos value is constantly going up and down day in day out!

Nah.. Gox doesn't let you buy higher than the lowest current asking price or sell lower than the highest bid price.  I found this out when I accidentally left a zero out of my asking price and it was executed immediately.  I thought I had just sold a bunch of coins at about 10x less than the current market price, but then I looked at my trade history and was glad to see that it was sold at the lowest bid price.