Been mining a few months with my PC's GPU and up to 8 coins now. My Jalapeno arrived today so I should be getting coins much quicker. Now that I'm actually starting to get some decent cash, I don't want to lose it.
I'm wondering what is best way to manage the coins. Now the coins I mine I simply have the mining pool send to my account at Mt.Gox. Is that a bad idea? I figure there is a much higher chance of me screwing something up on my end with a bitcoin wallet than Mt.Gox screwing something up.
Appreciate any advice on using a bitcoin wallet vs just keeping coins at an exchange place. Thanks!
If your coins are at MtGox (or anywhere you don't have the private key) then you don't have ANY Bitcoins. MtGox has your Bitcoins and MtGox has given you an IOU which you can see on your account page. If MtGox disapears, gets sued into oblivion, gets hacked, has their servers seized by the Japanese govt, etc then THEIR coins are gone and the IOU is worthless.
Now for some people this risk is acceptable only you can decide. If having an IOU from a company you know almost nothing about on the other side of the planet where if they don't pay you have almost no recourse to recover your funds "good enough"? If yes then sure you don't need a wallet.
This. I would be VERY wary of MtGox right now. See the service discussion of this forum for the amount of people with problems getting their money out. If you're going to store coins for the medium to long-term, I would put them on a paper wallet or via Armory's offline option. You can put some smaller spending coin amounts in a hot wallet like Blockchain.info, Electrum or whatever you prefer.