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I've created a GPG key on a newly installed Debian virtual machine. I've noticed that most keys I've seen begin with 0x, however the one I created doesn't. I selected 'RSA (set your own capabilities)' with a 4096 bit key size. Should I create again this key?

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  • could it be that you used different tools to view the keys each time? 0x is often a prefix to indicate that what follows is a hex string (base 16), eg. 0xABBA is actually only 2 bytes: 171 (ab) and 186 (ba) - here's a good article on the topic JIMBLOM '??
    – brynk
    Commented Apr 5, 2021 at 22:26

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most keys I've seen begin with 0x

I assume you are referring to the Key ID, and the 0x is not part of the actual key ID, but merely a display option indicating that the string of digits are hexadecimal (which all Key ID's are, including yours, regardless of whether they are prepended with "0x").

Should I create again this key?

No. The key is fine.

If you want GnuPG to display your keys with the "0x" you can add the option keyid-format 0xlong to your gpg.conf file.

If the gpg.conf file is not already present in your home directory's .gnupg/ directory, you can create it with bash:

echo 'keyid-format 0xlong' > $HOME/.gnupg/gpg.conf
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  • Great! Thank you. I wanted to be certain, since I hope to use the key for a long time.
    – nobody
    Commented Apr 6, 2021 at 14:36

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