I bought some Bitcoins using MtGox about 4 months ago. The experience was pretty smooth. I had to send money to their bank in Japan and they credited my accou

I bought some Bitcoins using MtGox about 4 months ago. The experience was pretty smooth. I had to send money to their bank in Japan and they credited my account. This increased the cost of aquiring bitcoins, because the bank also took a cut. In general, I don't trust my wallet in the hands of strangers so I don't keep my bitcoins with MtGox. Instead I encrypted my wallet.dat with GnuPG and put copies of it in several locations. Bitcoin Qt seems to be able to attach a passphrase to your wallet.dat as well, but I opted to go the manual route. I bought some bitcoins as an alternative to gold to balance my portfolio and hedge against inflation. In other words I plan to hold on to them for the forseeable future, so the inconvenience of dealing with the encryption manually is negligible.