Several master keys vs. master key ,and subkeys

[Sin Trenton]

On 2013-07-16 15:32, Werner Koch wrote:
>
>> You have a version B of your key, with a different password than
>> version A (where the primary key is still present)? Not that one
>> particular subkey per se has a different password?
>
> Usually this does not happen because GnuPG < 2.1 has no feature to merge
> secret subkeys.
>
>> If I were to create two different signing subkeys (usage:S), not sure
>> why, but still, I could give them different passwords?
>
> Yes.  The passphrtase protects the secret part of each key.  It just
> happens that gpg always syncs them to work withnthe same passphrase.
>
>> If you _can_ assign a separate, different password to a particular
>> subkey, I assume it is done under --edit-key, but how?
>
> You can't without hacking the code or making advanced use of gpgsplit.
>

Ah, so even if technically simplified, my previous understanding was 
basically correct. Thank you very much for this clarification, very useful!

> Okay.  I have my public key on all of my boxes because I use it to
> encrypt the backups (actually I encrypt the backups to several keys).
>

Which is basically the same then, though I may have fewer boxes (3, with 
mobile included, if we really should count it as a box) :)

>> The reason for 3 and 4 is that I discovered that during the day, I
>> more often want to _encrypt_ something to myself, a file or a short
>> piece of text, in various situations. It can be before uploading a
>> diary note or a customer file to Dropbox or pretty much just
>
> That is the cool thing with public key crypto.

+1! The day the practical possibilities of this dawned on me was a day 
of awsumness.

Bests

Sin T.