Warning: Bitcoin4Cash trades cancelled! Won't do business with Madhatter again.

[bitcool]

It's fine to send cash in the mail as long as it's a small amount and something you can afford to lose. I did it once and probably won't do it again.

[Bobby]

It's entirely possible that neither side is fradulent, but that a failure of the government managed postal system is to blame.

Sending cash in the mail has always sounded a little daft to me. At the very least shouldn't it be sent in a trackable way, like return receipt or something? Madhatter's site (and others) should recommend this, in my opinion.

The issue in question is not whether or not Madhatter received the payment.  He says he received it and returned it because he was unable to honor the locked in orders.  I have not yet received the return payment however I know "return to sender" mails can be subject to substantial delays up to 5 weeks in my experience so I'm not worried about my payment being eventually returned.  On his website Madhatter recommends against registered/tracked mail because it will cause additional delays, etc (which is true).  Personally I've sent hundreds of cash payments through Canada Post and never has a single one been lost.  I used to buy precious coins and collectible Paper Money through the internet and the vast majority of these were shipped untracked without a single incident of mail theft or loss with some valued between $250-$500. The only package I ever had lost was both tracked and insured by Canadapost Xprespost and unfortunately for me was worth much more ($3000) than the maximum insured value ($1000).  If ever I have to send packages valued above $1000 I'll always use UPS/Fedex in the future as they have even much delivery rates and will insure the full value of shipments. I suspect that tracking or declaring a value to a CanadaPost package makes it more susceptible to theft as most letters go through unnoticed without anyone suspecting there may be cash hidden inside.

[Ian Maxwell]

I'd ask to see the email, but I'm not sure what it would prove.

It could prove a lot! I'd like to see the email correspondence. Let their words speak for themselves!

To clarify: if the exchange is digitally signed, it will prove a lot. If it isn't, it won't prove anything, since it could just as easily have been fabricated on the spot.

Since eMansipator said it is signed, I'm hopeful.

[imanikin]

... If you want security, I would recommend that you use a wire transfer and buy/sell on Mt Gox.

I had a really great first experience at Bitmarket.EU, where one wires to the seller, rather than the exchange.

IMHO, MtGox is great for professional traders, trading teams, dark-pool dwellers and other market manipulators. Other than that, i think it's time to stop recommending the MtGox monopoly to the average user.

It's one of the entities making the fairytale about "the completely decentralized" Bitcoin a complete and absolute myth... 

[lonestranger]

My business is based on a niche. It's for people that want to buy/sell BTC with anonymity. Therefore, tracking a package defeats that purpose. If you want security, I would recommend that you use a wire transfer and buy/sell on Mt Gox.

But wait, how does tracking some random letter compromise one's identity, or amount purchased?

[cypherdoc]

... If you want security, I would recommend that you use a wire transfer and buy/sell on Mt Gox.

I had a really great first experience at Bitmarket.EU, where one wires to the seller, rather than the exchange.

IMHO, MtGox is great for professional traders, trading teams, dark-pool dwellers and other market manipulators. Other than that, i think it's time to stop recommending the MtGox monopoly to the average user.

It's one of the entities making the fairytale about "the completely decentralized" Bitcoin a complete and absolute myth... 

Ubitex is an anonymous peer to peer exchange.

[eMansipater]

Alright, I've had the chance to look at this with fresh eyes and I think I can identify the place where the situation diverged.  The lightbulb statement for me was this line:

What about the other batch of ancient trades that you emailed me about and then sent them with expresspost?

As you waded through your gobs of email I believe you confused the first half of my initial email, which asked about the two missing letters; with the second half which talked about three trades made immediately before emailing (weekend trades and email sent on Sunday).  To clarify I've inserted bolded comments below:

MIME-Version: 1.0
Received: by 10.14.119.135 with HTTP; Sun, 20 Mar 2011 18:59:46 -0700 (PDT)
Date: Sun, 20 Mar 2011 20:59:46 -0500
Delivered-To: jeffceth@gmail.com
Message-ID: <AANLkTinHz_Coj2Wakicg+06=qMX2N0R6MVXdCnmGqkq7@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: Bitcoin 4 Cash trade
From: Jeffery Coleman <jeffceth@gmail.com>
To: themadhatter@i2pmail.org
Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary=0016e65a0f68699a2f049ef47b7f

--0016e65a0f68699a2f049ef47b7f
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

Hi there,
I'm eMansipater
<http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2975>from the
bitcoin forums.  I've been using Bitcoin4Cash for a while and I
love it.  For my uses a little bit of a delay once you have a guaranteed
price is not much of a problem, and being able to participate in bitcoin
trading at a lower volume without unreasonable fees is invaluable to me.

I was wondering if you've been experiencing delays in receiving mail lately,
or had any pieces go missing in transit yet?  My first few trades with
bitcoin4cash took a couple weeks to complete, but the last two I sent (from Feb
10<https://www.bitcoin4cash.com/status.php?tcode=c19dd2e10ce5cfe5b27f96c644fa6766001a5c15>and
Mar
6<https://www.bitcoin4cash.com/status.php?tcode=0ac5e6b09c5423b002a63cf8b78169979e4c364a>respectively)
have apparently taken a bit longer, especially the first one.
 This comes at little surprise to me since there are reportedly issues with
the local mail distribution system testing an experimental modification
(mail to other destinations than just you has been delayed considerably).  I
mail my letters from different locations within the city just to prevent any
one person on this end from noticing the pattern and deciding to open one
up, but this slowdown would apply across the board.  I did want to check in
with you though since it's been a little while, and fill you in with that
additional info in case you have been experiencing lost pieces while also
letting you know I didn't just forget to send them.

{Everything above here is referring to the same two pieces that are the subject of my current complaint}
{Everything below here is referring to trades booked 0 business days before the email, and for which payment was sent within 10 business days of being authorised to}

I've been suggesting to many of my acquaintances that they invest a small
amount of cash they would be happy to lose in BTC, to help spread the early
risk of the currency amongst as many people as possible; the transactions I
tend to make through Bitcoin4Cash are mostly the result of that.  Over the
past few days I've reserved a total of close to 900 bitcoins, which is quite
a bit above average for me, and I'm hesitant to send them on through the
normal channels because of the delay in my last two mailings.  What do you
suggest?

For me, as you can probably tell, anonymity is not at all a concern.
 Neither is time involved, since most of these bitcoins are being held for
the long-term.  It's only the security of transfer that I'm interested in.
 Should I perhaps consider registered mail, or does that impact your
profile?

Anyways, I'm eager to hear what you have to say--at no particular rush.
 Thanks again for offering this service to the community!  I bought my first
bitcoins via bank account->email money transfer -> Liberty Reserve -> MT Gox
-> BTC and it was rather an expensive and cumbersome process.  Bitcoin4Cash
is much, much better!

sincerely,
Jeff Coleman / eMansipater

I apologise for the unwarranted speculation in my original post, which I have removed (although it exists for the record as quoted).  If I believed this was the second time this had occurred, I would have been suspicious too.  My original post is a good example of the paranoia that can arise when you are worried someone is trying to scam you, so I get it.

To recap without wasting anyone's valuable time, the only two letters of mine that have been late are the same two I have been communicating about with you from the beginning:

booked Feb 10
booked March 6th

while the expresspost I was asking permission to send on March 20 was for these three trades:

booked Friday March 18
booked Sunday March 20
booked Sunday March 20

After you authorised the expresspost on March 24th the money was on your doorstep within 10 business days, as all my trades have been.

When our conversation about the missing trades abruptly decayed I was extremely confused, but if you were operating under the assumption that I had previously been late with other trades, it finally makes sense to me.  Hopefully we can get this all resolved now.

[eMansipater]

For those who didn't dig deep into the news links, Canada Post workers could be striking as early as May 30.

http://www.bclocalnews.com/sports/122543553.html

[MoonShadow]

For those who didn't dig deep into the news links, Canada Post workers could be striking as early as May 30.

http://www.bclocalnews.com/sports/122543553.html

Wait, aren't the postal workers in Canada civil servants?  Civil servants in the US can't strike, union or not.  Which is how Regan got away with firing all of the air traffic controllers when they went on strike in the 1980's.

[Bobby]

Wait, aren't the postal workers in Canada civil servants?  Civil servants in the US can't strike, union or not.  Which is how Regan got away with firing all of the air traffic controllers when they went on strike in the 1980's.

Just 'cuz it's against "the law" doesn't mean they won't do it.  There are "illegal" strikes here in Canada all the time.  Anyway the politician who would try to fire them all would probably get assassinated by the union bosses' mob friends, at least here in Keb'ec, land of corruption.

[eMansipater]

Postal strikes are perfectly legal here, however it works out.

[Bobby]

Also want to update the status of the original posting.  I did receive Bitcoin4Cash's refund of my original payment for $350 as well as the 10% deposit of 28BTC.  However I think it was very immature and unprofessional of him to accuse me of attempting to scam him when he was the one who violated the terms of our contract.  If he had the guts to acknowledge and apologize for his mistake I might have forgiven him but I certainly won't ever do business again with someone who can't even own up to his own mistakes and instead blames his own customers, those who were let down after doing business with him on his terms in good faith that he would honor his contracts.  I can only feel sorry for this guy being such dishonorable loser.  When someone puts their trust in me I feel honored and wouldn't let them down no matter how many 100s of BTC or $$$ I might be able to gain by scamming them.  I apologized to my friend for not being able to obtain his BTC and insisted on paying him $2000 for the current market value of the BTC I was supposed to order for him.  Unfortunately my mistake in relying on Madhatter still caused my friend to distrust the Bitcoin community as a whole, the result of which I feel responsible for.

[Timo Y]

IMHO, MtGox is great for professional traders, trading teams, dark-pool dwellers and other market manipulators. Other than that, i think it's time to stop recommending the MtGox monopoly to the average user.

It's one of the entities making the fairytale about "the completely decentralized" Bitcoin a complete and absolute myth... 

Even for the average user it makes sense to go to the place with the highest liquidity, because there you are likely to get the best exchange rate/ lowest spread.

I don't even think mtgox is the best exchange in terms of user experience, but somehow it managed to become the largest (perhaps because it was one of the first), and because it's the largest it attracts most people and becomes even larger.

Market forces will always push towards a small number of big exchanges dominating the market. There is little we can do to prevent this.

[HerbJones]

I just want to say that I sent my order to Madhatter and had no problems. Thanks!

[eMansipater]

Madhatter, you are making this seriously annoying!!  I'm not ranting--I'm just tired of this thing dragging out so long here.  I have bent over backwards here to find your mistake, and to make peace.  This is win-win, bro!  Don't make me put this in my signature  .  Just bite the bullet and admit you got a little too busy with everything and missed a detail--I don't think anyone here cares about bruised egos.  Are you telling me that in three months neither of these letters have arrived?  Because they haven't ended up back here.  I have better things to do right now than explain to my bride-to-be why I still don't have the 214.45 bitcoins OR the missing-in-transit $200 OR even the 21.44 in bitcoin deposits you keep saying you'll return.  And don't give me that "I don't have an address to send them to" bit either, because my address is right there on those pages on your server that I've linked to several times now.  Seriously man [playful bulldog face].

The whole reason people who don't send money are scamming you is that the agreement is made at time of deposit.  You can't insert deadlines after the fact without warning, and me re-sending MIA cash is more than fair since I'm taking the hit.  You've got to be filthy wealth at this point--just bite the bullet and do the right thing before rising prices make it feel even harder.  I am not going away.

[eMansipater]

bump.

[barbarousrelic]

I'm not ranting--I'm just tired of this thing dragging out so long here.

bump.

[mikewillz]

and I thought me waiting 24 hrs for 11 BTC was bad. SHEESH!!!

[airdata]

I guess at this point he could sell the btc he was going to give you and refund your money and profit at the same time.

[eMansipater]

I guess at this point he could sell the btc he was going to give you and refund your money and profit at the same time.

There are a *lot* of ways this can be resolved to mutual benefit in such a bull market, and any of them that includes a retraction of the smirch on my character and a best-effort attempt to make good would earn back my respect.  Does anyone else want to send him a polite reminder email about this thread?  I have continued to send such notices, but I suspect he may be blocking my address.