On this page:
https://bitcoin-otc.com/viewgpg.php?nick=Animazing
What is meant by a "fingerprint", as given in one of the column headings?
Thanks
https://bitcoin-otc.com/viewgpg.php?nick=Animazing
What is meant by a "fingerprint", as given in one of the column headings?
Thanks
The fingerprint you see is fingerprint of Animazing's public key which is used to verify the PGP key you have is Animazing's.
For example, if Alice wishes to authenticate a public key as belonging to Bob, she can contact Bob over the phone or in person and ask him to read his fingerprint to her, or give her a scrap of paper with the fingerprint written down. Alice can then check that this trusted fingerprint matches the fingerprint of the public key. Exchanging and comparing values like this is much easier if the values are short fingerprints instead of long public keys.
{...}
In addition, fingerprints can be queried with search engines in order to ensure that the public key that a user just downloaded, can be seen by third party search engines. If the search engine returns hits referencing the fingerprint linked to the proper site(s), one can feel more confident that the key is not being injected by an attacker, such as a Man-in-the-middle(MITM) attack.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_key_fingerprint
https://www.nieveler.org/PGP/pgp.htm