I dunno if that works or is any less confusing, to be honest.
I don’t think there’s any process or entity in the physical world that is reasonably familiar to most people that is even remotely suitable as an analogy to public key cryptography.
I don’t think there’s any process or entity in the physical world that is reasonably familiar to most people that is even remotely suitable as an analogy to public key cryptography.
I think the reason we (the HN crowd) don’t like it is that the analogy starts to break down when you start thinking through all of the operations you can do with public keys. But this does not matter much for somebody learning to use them for the first time. I’ve had to grow comfortable with the idea of giving people imperfect explanations so that they can build an intuition. Once that happens I can return with the mathematics so that they can really understand what is going on.
These are not analogs to things ordinary people had already seen. For Computation we just got used to it being everywhere and so we don't need to explain it so much.