As a Bitcoiner, you’re going to need a secure way to communicate privately, without relying on a company to encrypt your data for you. For example, freely available methods with end-to-end encryption like Telegram (not with its default option) and Signal and others are easy to use, but I don’t completely trust them.

This article will show you how to send messages using free open-source software, GNU Privacy Guard (gpg), which allows encryption and decryption using public and private key cryptography. It’s more tricky at first to DIY, but once you get the hang of it, it’s not that hard. I’ll take you through it step by step, just follow along and bookmark this article for future reference.

This is a little more background about gpg (including pgp) for those who wish to dig deeper. It’s of interest to note that public and private key cryptography is not only used for encryption and decryption, but also used for the verification of digital signatures — used in Bitcoin transactions and also data in general (e.g., checking if the software you downloaded is genuine and not tampered with, as shown in the first video here).

HOW IT WORKS
To make a public and private key pair, your computer generates a very large (“unguessable”) random number from which the gpg software will create for us a private key, and from that, a public key is created (just like Bitcoin private keys, more info here).

The public key is shared with the world (like a Bitcoin address) and contains your ID (email and name) which you publish online. Here is mine. Think of the public key like an open safe. Anyone can write a message and encrypt that message with your PUBLIC key (i.e., put it in your safe and lock the door shut) — only you have the private key and, therefore, only you can open your safe (i.e., decrypt and read the message).

A side note: Don’t worry about this for now — just note that, in Bitcoin, there is no “encryption” going on with payments. Instead, there are “signatures” made with private keys, which can be “verified” by anyone using public keys.


    OVERVIEW

In this guide, I’ll take you through the following steps:

1. Download gpg.
2. Make your own private and public key.
3. Store your private key to a USB drive.
4. Upload your private key to your other computer's’ keychain.
5. Upload your PUBLIC key to a keyserver and/or your website.
6. Upload your public key’s fingerprint to your online profile, e.g., Twitter or Keybase.
7. Send me a message encrypted with my public key, and I will reply encrypting with your public key.