wait why do you need accounts? what are you doing with them?
I would ask the same thing. It's not identity theft; it's identity switch. But in some ways it amounts to the same thing. What's up with this? It makes me totally ignore who I am reading or talking to because I have no trust in the continuity of the person's identity.
It's okay to do this, but not okay to post a link to thesilkrdotcom. Scratch my head. Go figure.
People will make GPG accounts and sign messages that really need proven authenticy. For example here is my GPG sig: http://bitcoin-otc.com/viewgpg.php?nick=wachtwoord
I still don't get it. What is a GPG account?
A public/private cryptography pair. If you want to understand bitcoins, you should really first understand cryptography. Take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-key_cryptography
Indeed nice to read. Also check out: http://www.gnupg.org/gph/en/manual.html
Practically speaking, because of my public/private key pair (of which the public one is public and the private one only known to me):
1) Sign a message, proving I am the author
2) Someone can encrypt a message using my public key that only I can decrypt (event he sender cannot!)
All this requires me to keep my private key secure though
(This is the same system that is used in Bitcoin)