Will viewing keys make it practical to enable wallet locking?

I have to put something here… Just to repeat - Will viewing keys make it practical to enable wallet locking?

If by wallet locking you mean wallet encryption, then no I don’t think view keys would help with all the issues that encryption creates.

From the Zcash security warnings:

  • Encrypted wallets are unable to correctly detect shielded spends (due to the nature of unlinkability of JoinSplits) and can incorrectly show larger available shielded balances until the next time the wallet is unlocked. This problem was not limited to failing to recognize the spend; it was possible for the shown balance to increase by the amount of change from a spend, without deducting the spent amount.

  • While encrypted wallets prevent spending of funds, they do not maintain the shielding properties of JoinSplits (due to the need to detect spends). That is, someone with access to an encrypted wallet.dat has full visibility of your entire transaction graph (other than newly-detected spends, which suffer from the earlier issue).

  • We were concerned about the resistance of the algorithm used to derive wallet encryption keys (inherited from Bitcoin) to dictionary attacks by a powerful attacker. If and when we re-enable wallet encryption, it is likely to be with a modern passphrase-based key derivation algorithm designed for greater resistance to dictionary attack, such as Argon2i.

https://github.com/zcash/zcash/blob/master/doc/security-warnings.md