I'm not hip to whatever payment methods people use to buy drugs and other black/gray market goods.
This has nothing to do with drugs or black or gray market and has everything to do with exchanging an irreversible form of money for an easily reversible form. Convert your reversible form (PayPal, CC, etc.) to an irreversible form (MP, cash, Dwolla, etc.) then you will have no problem exchanging it for BTC. As noted above the problem is not with BTC the problem is with the easily reversible PayPal and Credit Cards.
I wasn't saying it had to do with drugs, I was just saying that I'm used to interacting in an environment where people aren't automatically assumed to be scammers and thieves. I understand WHY things are the way they are with Bitcoin, and I'm not saying that people are wrong for being paranoid, I'm just ignorant to the methods scammers use to protect themselves from each other, as I'm not used to dealing in an environment where nobody's able to trust each other.
Drug trade, and gray market are really the only other areas I can think of where that might be the case, so I have to assume that those are the only other common uses for things like moneypacks (aside from maybe, low-level tax evasion and money laundering).
I can't imagine a single scenario besides Bitcoin, where one would need to use Moneypack, instead of a more legitimate and recognized form of payment, unless there's something already a little shady going on in the first place. Nobody goes looking for harder ways to get stuff done, unless there's a good reason to hide what they're doing. That's all I'm sayin'.
I've been trying since yesterday to find a way to purchase about $1300 worth of Bitcoin, for a group buy of ASIC chips that's going to close at any minute, and everything so far has been an epic fail. I can't find anybody local who sells, for me to be able to do a F2F purchase; all the companies that do this are gonna takes days to weeks, and individuals who I could buy it from online don't want to take normal payment methods, and usually don't have enough to justify the extra effort, because I'd have to do that multiple times for multiple transactions with multiple people, and then just HOPE they all come though on time...
So I'm pretty frustrated with Bitcoin as a currency at this point. And probably taking it out on people who don't deserve it.
Anyway, I didn't intend to hijack this thread. Apologies to the OP.