Too bad! I have been following along, let me make a quote from earlier in this thread to illustrate my point.
so the wallet cannot be viewed until a password is provided. this is an interesting change indeed. it'll certainly protect people from sending money to wallets they can't spend from.
Thomas affirmed that as partly the coding reason a post or two below the member that originally made the comment. Unfortunately there have been several folks that have sent money to an address in their watching only wallets only to find out they lost their private keys due to computer failure and they didn't have their SEED backed up. The encryption feature on a watching only wallet would be useless for recovery (no private keys), but it would have been nice for privacy on an open and running computer.
Yep I made that comment originally
Yes it would be a good feature to have for watch-only wallets too from a privacy standpoint. But not from a loss avoidance standpoint:
- With watch-only wallets you get a warning during start up that the wallet is watch-only and you better make sure that you have the seed. With seeded wallets there is no such warning.
- The sort of people who make watch-only wallets are technically more proficient than your average electrum user. They are expected to be more responsible with their actions.
- There is no guarantee that, just because you know the password to your watch-only wallet, you also have the seed. The seed is not in the watch-only wallet file so it has nothing to do with the password you put on the wallet file. With seeded wallets you have this promise, if you will, that if you entered the right password you can go ahead and safely receive money to your wallet but you can't say the same for watch-only wallets.
If you still want this then maybe you can make an issue about it on github but i for one don't think it makes sense if the aim is to save people from losing their money by sending their coins to an inaccessible address.