Quick bitcoin guide: Acquiring/buying bitcoins

Bitcoins have become very popular lately. I will release some quick guides from now on introducing bitcoin.

This first guide will show you how to acquire/buy bitcoins, and put them into your personal wallet, and how you wallet works.

Wallets
You can get as many wallets as you would like. Opening up a wallet can be done in literarily seconds. Your wallet can be stored either on your computer in a file, on a piece of paper or on a online wallet service. The access to you wallet can be held in multiple copies, so remember to make some kind of backup and don't only store it on your local harddrive if you chose to store it in a file.

Running linux, I prefer using a wallet tool called multibit. With multibit I can easily create new wallets, get the value in local currency based on mtgox retrieve and send bitcoins to others.

Acquiring/buying some bitcoins
The easyest way for me was using justcoin.com. There is also a lot of other online services which can help you buy some bitcoins. When you sign up for an account and buy the bitcoins, the bitcoins usually gets places on a online wallet on the service you are using. After that, you can easily transfer the bitcoins in just seconds to your local wallet. It will then take some more minutes before the money has been completely integrated into the blockchain. In multibit you can see this process happening live.

Securing your local wallet
After creating your wallet in multibit, make sure you add a password to your wallet. Easily done. After that, backup the wallet file somewhere secure. You can i.e. use a truecrypt container or keepassx. This is important, because if someone else gets their hand on your wallet file, they can steal the money in seconds, and it will be impossible for you to get them back.