[Cryptography] Thoughts about keys

[James A. Donald]

On 2013-09-01 11:16 AM, Jeremy Stanley wrote:
> At free software conferences, where there is heavy community 
> penetration for OpenPGP already, it is common for many of us to bring 
> business cards (or even just slips of paper) with our name, E-mail 
> address and 160-bit key fingerprint. Useful not only for key signing 
> (when accompanied by photo identification), but also simply allows 
> someone to retrieve your key from a public keyserver and confirm the 
> fingerprint matches the one you handed them. 
The average user is disturbed by the sight a 160 bit hash.

When posting graphic images on my blog, I have to name the image twice, 
once when I store it on my website, and once when I reference it in a 
post.   Despite the fact that the names are meaningful and human 
readable, and the total number of images is not unreasonably large, I 
find it quite difficult to enter exactly the same name the same way 
twice.  Much of the time the image mysteriously fails to appear, even 
though I cannot see any typo, the two spellings right in front of me 
look exactly alike.

The end user's instinctive fear of 160 bit hashes is well founded..