How safe is the wallet if or when released? Obviously, using this wallet would mean trusting the wallet's developer or creator. And, most importantly, being convinced that such wallets are at no risk of being accessed via a backdoor system.
I love the idea of engraving both the public and private keys on the card, protected by a passphrase-protected Bitcoin private key. Is it really secure?
This thread gives a good idea of how strong BIP38 encryption is:
I'm BIP38 curious, please help me out!.
In short: password zLwMiR was not cracked in 2 years for a 1 BTC (more than $1000 at the time) prize. It would cost more in computing power than it's worth.
I can think of one scenario to crack it though: suppose a hacker has access to a botnet of a million computers, that would give him enough computing power to crack this password without high cost.
This can of course easily be prevented by using a longer password.
That being said, I'd still have a very hard time trusting anyone with my BIP38 encrypted private key. It feels scary, even though the math says it's okay.