I've been reading up on the relationship between private keys and public keys (as well as hashing), watched a few videos, but I am still a bit confused.
I don't have a programming background and trying to understand it in a way so that I am able to explain it to an "everyday person".
What I found is that before a message is "encrypted" with a "public key" that key FIRST must be shared with the receiver.
How is that the public key being shared?
Thanks for your help, Arthur
Yes, somebody encrypting a message uses your public key, so without your key he cannot encrypt... You need your private key to decrypt the message. You messed up the fact that the pubkey must be sent to the receiver tough... The sender needs the public key to encrypt the data, the receiver needs the private key to decrypt. The receiver generates a private/public keypair, keeps the private key private and distributes the public key.
As for how to share the public key => assuming your talking about pgp: key servers like this one usually do the trick:
https://pgp.mit.edu/