Just see another victim of the 100-address trap in the Chinese subforum. 10BTC lost. Comments in the thread say the best option for noobs is to use a centralized bitcoin bank. I just feel speechless and don't want to argue with them
Should we just remove the wallet function of Bitcoin Core if HD is not (read: will never be) implemented? If people want to be a full node, they can use Armory. Otherwise, they can use Electrum.
Actually, wallets without deterministic backup (e.g. Bitcoin Core) should not be recommended in bitcoin.org
jl2012-- Your thread title and premise is needlessly antagonistic; and came close to just being ignored by me completely.
Lets be clear about this. In 2011 I proposed deterministic wallets. Other contributors in Bitcoin Core vigorously opposed them because they make backups a liability and undermine good key management practices,
Subsequently, I came up with the homomorpic public derivation, Pieter later formalized it in (and the non-publicly generatable scheme as well) in BIP32. However, we believed that the the cryptography was too new and conjectural to rush out and deploy. Other wallets have done so, and some have done so in ways (e.g. only supporting the public derivation, and always using it; while simultaneously supporting key export) which has resulted in funds loss too. Conservationism here is justified especially so in that one can simply set the key-pool to an arbitrarily high value and obtain most of the values of the fancier schemes; without many of of their costs.
Today the people opposed to it have been convinced or at least worn down. There is an implementation of BIP32 in the Bitcoin Core codebase. Everyone active on the project has been working primarily just keeping the system afloat; there are very few substantial contributors, and I have no lately seen any work from you on this. Suggesting removing a huge swath of useful, widely used, and generally reliable software because some functionality is not (yet!) incorporated is an insult.