Allowing a separate key to view account

[Salavator]

As I understand it (and I am new to this so I might be wrong) the best way to keep your bitcoins safe is to make your wallet in a live cd environment, make copies of the wallet on removable media and then send bitcoins to this account from a second account on your main computer (on which you only keep a small amount of bitcoins due to venerability to viruses) . However this means that you cannot check that your bitcoins have reached your account without starting up a live cd and reinstalling the bitcoin client and your wallet key.

Would it not be possible to generate a second key for your wallet that allows you only to view the account but not actually send any bitcoins, this would allow you to keep tabs on your main account without the risk of your wallet being stolen.

I imagine this feature might have other advantages to it as well.

[error]

If you decrypted only the public keys you could do this, but it would take quite a bit of re-engineering the GUI to support a "read only" mode.

[Meni Rosenfeld]

You can look up the address in http://blockexplorer.com/ .

[Pieter Wuille]

Using the wallet encryption in upcoming version 0.4, this is possible: the client is fully functional without entering the password, except for doing transactions.