Bitcoin tutorial

Here are some of the websites and processes I use to handle bitcoins:

https://blockchain.info/wallet/

The easiest way to handle your Bitcoins is to sign up with an on-line provider. I use blockchain.info's wallet for holding small amounts of Bitcoin and moving them about. It's a useful site because it allows you to explore your transactions (and other people's transactions too). It's fairly useble and self-explanatory.

https://intersango.com/

This is the first site I used to buy Bitcoins. I used a SEPA transfer to send cash there, and it only took a couple of days for the cash to turn up on my account. There are sometimes problems transferring Bitcoins out - if the outward transfer doesn't happen within a couple of hours, cancelling it and trying again seems to work.

The site used to have nice charts in the buy/sell section that showed how many people were "asking" for Bitcoins and how many were "selling", but now there's just a table of orders. Don't go with the rate that the "buy" recommends - scroll down to the table and see what the lowest "sell" offer is and bid at that rate. The "buy" recommendation is always higher than it needs to be. Trading fees are 0.65%, and Bitcoins you hold can be transferred out for free.

https://mtgox.com/

Mt Gox is the main trading site. I haven't transferred cash to them, so don't know how well that works. However, as the largest volume trader, they kind of set the benchmark for the "value of a Bitcoin at the moment". I've traded between dollars and Bitcoins, and paying Bitcoins into your account is easy and fairly fast (about an hour, as they want 6 confirmations of the transaction). Fees are 0.65% but drop for each transaction until you hit 0.5%.

https://www.bitaddress.org

This is a useful site for generating a "paper wallet" to store larger quantities of Bitcoin (which I unfortunately don't have). You can load the site, disconnect from the internet, generate some Bitcoin public/private key pairs and then print them out on a piece of paper. They end up looking like nice certificates, which you can store in a safe or in a filing cabinet, to be redeemed on a rainy day. You can load up the public key (your so-called Bitcoin address) with Bitcoins from your Intersango or Mt Gox purchase, and when you want to redeem them go to blockchain.info and enter your private key in your wallet to be able to spend.

Caveat Emptor: there are always risks involved in using third-party sites, which all of the above are.

Mt Gox should be reliable as they handle a lot of trading traffic, but on the other hand they are the highest profile Bitcoin target there is for hackers.

I don't know how reliable Intersango really is (there are some complaints on the Bitcoin.org forums), but I've never had any trouble with them.

Blockchain.info is well established too, but other online wallet providers have been hacked, and when they are people's Bitcoins go missing - sometimes forever. There is no Government-backed or bank backed insurance policy, so you're on  your own with Bitcoin.

I looked through the bitaddress.org javascript source code and couldn't see anything fishy (no AJAX or POST code to send your private address back to the site owner, and nothing that suggested the Bitcoin keys were being made from a limited address pool that would be vulnerable to brute-force cracking). However, as a live site it could always be changed from one minute to the next ...