> That has nothing to do with PGP. You could do the same by base64-ing an OTR session (in fact, people do that all the time).
But PGP also works for printing stuff on a post-card (or you know, email) - asynchronous communication. While Axolotl does push OTR-like modes towards asynchronous use - they do involve a lot more than getting hold of a public key (say, one published in a magazine, or shown in a frame of a movie, or...).
There's been an argument since the early crypto-wars about whether gpg/pgp could (should) be made easier to use. And I absolutely think it could (and should).
Key distribution is still hard, but it's not helped by a silly cli app, and no great recommendations on how to manage trust (I suppose the gist is: get a hw token for your key, print a backup and store a revocation order in a safe, sign keys you trust and upload them to the keyservers. But even if that list seems easy, users are left with questions like: which hw tokens should I use? When I lose it, "re-trusting" keys? How big a problem is it that I've just exported meta-data about who I communicate with? Which clients easily integrates with my hw token so that I can use gpg on my smart phones, my laptop and my desktop? What if my phone lacks NFC? Can't use USB host? And last, but certainly not least -- why isn't there a fork of gpg2 that does "the right thing(tm)" out of the box -- and make this "best of breed" flow easy, rather than making all kinds of sub-key shenanigans equally cryptic?)
