Okay, don't assume people won't be interested in interesting things. Who is this general public, anyway? It's not an homogeneous group; it's made up of physicians, mechanics, teachers, lovers, Doomsday preppers, engineers, preachers, and all kinds of people who have special interests. The thing I see is that if you show them how it matters to them in their special role, rather than to them as members of this general public, they may well take an interest. Some of them may become very deeply interested indeed, if they needed such a thing but didn't know about it until you showed them!
It's interesting to you, not to most other people. Source: 25 years of talking to people about encryption. Most people just want stuff to work, not to know how it works.
Honestly, it's not been that interesting to me in general. It's only interesting to me for the same reason it might be interesting to the sorts of people I enumerated --- because of the ways it can be useful to me. I don't really care about how it works, in depth; I just want it to keep my stuff private. The only difference is that I have just enough technical expertise, as a programmer, that I can see its applicability without having it explained in a sympathetic manner.
