I have been seeing people signing posts on forums and on sites like reddit with PGP keys, and in rare circumstances straight up encrypting their conversations with each other. It's interesting to see, and I think it would be cool to do in a nerdy kind of way.
What are your thoughts on this? Perhaps there is a reason to do this on certain sites that I'm not realizing, but to me I wouldn't think it would be needed on most sites.
Huh, thats really interesting! I probably wouldn't use it for my account, mainly because I don't think I have anything important enough to say that warrants me proving its truly me. But who knows, maybe it'd be just be a good practice.
EDIT: And that second point is very good as well!
hey it's me, your friend from that place where you sold that one thing. You said you sent that thing you sold to me. I changed my mind. Please just refund my money to here -> scam..
^ This probably happens 100's of times per day.
I get that, and I suppose I would use a key to sign that type of message, but I see posts like this one I'm typing that have been signed.
We use a similar method for our passwords here. Your password goes through the process and gets saved as a long string of numbers and letters that's nothing near the actual password. When you try to login, it sends the entered password through the system to see if the output matches the stored one when you created the account. So if the database gets hacked, and everything gets leaked, your personal password looks something like "$ald34jio5hkj4n5rt4jlkn45jnkj45n34jk5n" to the hacker.
Isn't that how Bitcoin transactions work to, to a certain extent? Or maybe I'm confusing the two concepts...
Yeah, it's pretty good, been around for a while.. Also a great way to confirm that the account responding hasn't been hijacked and giving false information.
You can send private messages in plain view, fuzzing your access to the message with the rest of the users on the site as well as your responses, and making sure that not even spez level accounts can see/edit the contents.