is it possible to protect the keys with BIP38 encryption?
I've been looking into this recently.
The conclusion I've came up with is not to implement BIP38 because in the long run it will hurt users more then it will help them.
Here's why:
BIP38 is still just a proposal (BIP = Bitcoin Improvement Proposal), and it's been a draft for more than a year now. Until it's not accepted as standard there is no guaranty that this proposal won't changes, and it probably will to some extent after it's fully reviewed. Until that time, if I were to implement this, users would be tied to that (non-standardized-now) implementation even when standard changes later. That's why I won't implement it and I advise not to use BIP38 from any other site because it will just bring problems in the long run.
I can think of scenario in future where we have one piece of encrypted date that can be decrypted to different private key using old non-standardized and new standardized BIP38, and which can be then used to create compressed and uncompressed public key. Resulting with 4 addresses. (Compressed key is madness on its own which doesn't bring any benefit to bitcoin community at all, but that's not the topic here...)
Still it might be good idea to implement some other standardized secure way of encrypting important date (private key in this case). AES probably makes seance (which is also proposed to be used inside BIP38) because it's broadly used, secure and standardized. Although data encrypted using AES will be a bit longer then it would be with BIP38, but not much.
This type of subject is why bitcoin is not mainstream and won't be for a while. I would love to store my coins securely and feel I am not going to wake up with them gone. However, the farther I chase the secure-my-coins issue down the rabbit hole the more I am lost in wonderland.
