Wladimir J van der Laan's signing key:
[snip]
The best would be to confirm this information by looking at other independent sources.
If you trust bitcointalk.org (and its moderators!), you are fine to use it. The best would be still to verify it using other sources.
I think it would be a good idea to start making t-shirts with all sorts of useful GPG keys printed on them... although that comes with it's own problems if any keys on the t-shirt are compromised!!!
but something along those lines could be useful, it's a little more concerning that someone's key that we all rely doesn't get stolen, but gets spoofed somehow instead, and that gets used to perform some kind of theft or attack
gpg is bit confusing
everything about gpg is not going to "click" inside your head the first few times you use it. But once you've used it a hundred times, it makes increasingly more sense.
then, you've got an incredibly powerful tool in your hands, just like you have with Bitcoin