If you don't feel like reading the story of how I came to acquire these locks, Here's the eBay auction of the item that will be ended if I receive a decent offer in BTC for it on BitcoinTalk:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=231109673545
Also, if you have an eBay account, whether or not you intend to buy, do me a favor and click "Add to Watch List" link located under the price of this item. I'd prefer to receive an offer on the forums, but if I don't, the more watchers an eBay auction has, the more attention it attracts via eBay's search engine.
So, a while ago I helped a friend of mine again who runs a small, local, computer repair business. He only has one employee that works full-time. When this employee gets sick, he sometimes calls me in to help clear his backlog of PC's with various software issues. Also, I usually end up doing some assessments on computers brought in to the store recently where the customer had already given the OK to reformat the computer if necessary. Some of these systems are so chock full of trojans/malware/viruses/keyloggers that it's just more time efficient to format the drive and install preventative and real-time AV tools then to try to sift through the tens of thousands of infections that are on some of these comps.
Anyway, at first the guy just paid me cash for my trouble. Then for a while, if I saw some item I thought I could sell, I'd ask him if I could take it instead. That worked for a little while but eventually he stopped letting me do that and started paying cash again. Recently, however, I got him to agree that I would be paid a certain amount (0.18) of BTC for any future work in lieu of cash, the amount staying locked-in regardless of any market fluctuation. He is interested in Bitcoin, but has always been skeptical that it would last. The last time I helped him he was short on the 0.18BTC he owed me and asked if I wanted cash. I politely refused and asked if I could take something from the store instead. He initially balked but mentioned he did have a surplus of some notebook locks and other (lame) accessories that he hadn't sold enough of and rather than returning all of them to his supplier he would let me take as many as I wanted. He owed me like roughly $180 in BTC at the time of the agreement, plus I didn't want a fuckload of notebook locks laying around in my car or house that look as if they had just "fallen" off the back of a semi-truck. Having only a general idea of what I could sell them for, I asked if I could just take 7-8 of the locks as a month's interest until he sends me the BTC, since I figured he didn't have any BTC at the moment. The other thing is I know he prefers to do cash-in-the-mail trades with someone on LocalBitcoins.com, and it takes time for those trades to happen. I really just wanted 3-4 of the locks, I thought he would counter my initial offer but he thought for a few seconds and agreed.
If I hadn't known this guy for 10 years there's no way I'd set up such an agreement, but I trust him, plus I'm hoping the 0.18 BTC total we agreed to at the time will appreciate although I haven't been liking what I've been seeing in the last 24 hours. He's set to pay me back at the beginning of next week, so we'll see what happens.
I mentioned all that to say this: I'm currently selling a few of the locks in a combo listing on eBay. Just as I offered with the Sony MDR-7506 Studio Monitors, I'd rather sell them on here to establish more trust in the user base. The headphones ended up selling for $61 + shipping, but even if I'd get more money on eBay for it, I'd take a hit on the final price just to keep the transaction in BTC and build trust within the BitcoinTalk community.
Also, I figured if I just plopped down an offer to sell 4 of the same item it might arouse some suspicion that these goods once resided on an 18-wheeler that recently had its destination switched in a way Robert Deniro's character in Goodfellas is familiar with.
Now that I've realized I've typed a wall of text intended to reassure any potential buyers, I think I may have done more harm than good. I can't wait for the first, "Try the Silk Road, we're not criminals here." reply.
