[MichaelGG]

That'd be some confusion. They just need to look at their cold wallet addresses to see the balance, right?

[nwh]

Old wallets can be huge, tens of thousands of receiving addresses large. Most aren't even displayed to the client (change addresses).

[gojomo]

And maybe if they'd tried to be clever, with custom "high-security" key-generation/key-splitting tricks, but actually wound up being stupid, without good records of public-addresses... then reconstructing the public-addresses for lookup could be just as hard as reconstructing the private-keys.

Of course we're in wild-speculation territory but it's an interesting creative extreme-scenario exercise.