What percentage of all of the people you know have actually signed or encrypted a message using PGP?
And to your question about who uses PGP, 99.9% of people on this forum use it. Depending on the transaction I sign the address. So people can trace it back to me. Theymos uses, John K uses, the real escrowers use it. So for you to imply that it is hardly use it is not true.
The people on this forum are
all of the people you know? Stop strawmanning and think of
all the people you know, your parents, your dentist, the grocery checkout clerk. How many of them have heard of PGP or can describe its proper use? But they know the "little lock thing" on the browser means things are at least trying to be secure, and commerce may proceed. Would I use this for transactions valued in the BTC equivalent of millions of dollars? Probably not-- that sort of thing requires a stronger trust model than SSL achieves.
PGP might be a more "correct" way to approach this, but I'm looking for something that will work right now in the real world, and have real benefits even if it ain't perfect. If implemented, this will improve the trust and security of almost every Bitcoin merchant transaction. And for bonus points, it's trivially easy to implement.
I was a huge fan of PGP ten or so years ago, to the point where I gave a presentation on the subject to a local ColdFusion (the programming language) user group meeting. I sill do conference sessions from time to time about how public key encryption, SSL, and PGP work. People are always startled to discover that the top of the SSL trust layer isn't at the CA layer, it's the browser manufacturers, who choose which CAs to include.
Unfortunately, my attempts to get my circle of nerd friends to embrace PGP fizzled every time. Today I see it used pretty much daily for encryption during B2B document exchange, but key signing is nonexistent and the public key exchange is done in a depressingly insecure way.
That being said, it'd be fairly easy to optionally replace "sigdomain" with "sigkey" (or perhaps "sigpgp") and attach a key ID (or perhaps fingerprint, but I'm trying to keep it short) and PGP sig hash instead. But I'm trying to get an idea off the ground that could work with the whole world
today.For all of the complaints about SSL, and I'll be the first to agree that many are valid, it's
still way better than nothing. And it's time to do better than nothing.