Quote from: ekarleke on August 21, 2012, 05:25 amYOU ROCK!!OK, now I am am pushing with one last question to end my day on the SR...I want to finalize this order early tomorrow... Do you think it is unwise to have those funds sit there over night? Again, I know this is my responsibility!The safest place to have your coins is in your own encrypted wallet on your own computer, using the orginal Satoshi Bitcoin client. Regularly back this up, encrypt the backup, and email it to yourself.Personally I would never leave coins in an online Instawallet as they have been known to shut down out of the blue and keep everybody's coins.This is highly unlikely with blockchain.info as it's pretty much an 'unofficial, official' Bitcoin site/project, but still, would you give a guy that you'd just met on the street all of your money and ask him to mind it for you until you're ready to spend it?As you've just installed it, the original client has to download the entire blockchain to your computer, and this will take some time as the blockchain is quite large at present, and increasing in length (and so, size) all the time. "Synchronizing with network" means that the client is downloading the blockchain, and though it may seem slow, leave it overnight and (depending on your internet connection speed) it should be done by the morning. Open the client regularly in order to let it download the blocks that have been mined since the last time you ran it and it'll catch up in a matter of minutes.As for your encryption questions, no, online wallets aren't encrypted as such, and yes, most sellers here require you to send your personal details (name, address) encrypted when placing an order. Some will accept Privnote but this is generally viewed as completely insecure.It takes a very short amount of time to learn how to use PGP, and the safety benefits from doing so are impossible to quantify."pine" very kindly runs the PGP Club to help new users out with this; you'll find it here: http://dkn255hz262ypmii.onion/index.php?topic=30938.0- grahamgreene