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.
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...
yup, exactly! bitcoin [and other coins] also have a built-in messaging system that uses the same private keys to make super sure that it's the same people having the conversion back and forth. All without needing a third party system that may have its own security issues.
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!