You have a very large subthread debating downstream confusions, which were previously debated in millions of such discussion on-line too. It's a confusion every

You have a very large subthread debating downstream confusions, which were previously debated in millions of such discussion on-line too. It's a confusion everyone has to learn to live with when first exposed to concept and the metaphor of "keys" and "locks". And it's because it does not fit. Locks and keys are distinct kinds of objects, and are external to the thing being protected, with lock itself being attached to the thing being protected. Only the key can be distributed separately and copied; you come into possession of the security mechanism and the protected object together, they're literally unseparable (that's the point - if you can separate the lock from the thing, you don't need the key anymore). Encryption in contrast is (reversibly) destroying the thing being protected, the "locking mechanism" is public and same for everyone and therefore you already have a copy, and you can't "bypass" it because the very thing being protected has been destroyed (scrambled) and you cannot undo that without having the "key". There's no 1:1 mapping of any concept from physical locks and keys to encryption. It's a fundamentally dumb analogy that people run away with, because at first look it seems to have some semantic similarities.