Please explain how someone can lose bitcoins this way.

Simple: Sell them bitcoin, tell them to download Core to receive. Make it look like you sent them coins, show them fake block explorer etc. and convince them "don't worry, they'll show up in your wallet once you sync, go home and sync, buddy."

Less Simple: Core not syncing. Bitcoins not arriving. Panic, ask online somewhere. Not understanding jargon. White Knight shows up with solution. Turns out it was scammer that just asked to send private keys, and did.

Even Less Simple: dump private keys. import to Electrum or something. Continue using the same keys and forget that the private keys were copied to their memo app in the interim (or evernote or whatever) then someday coins get stolen.

Basically, it seems like Core is saying "hmm, users understand all this stuff and we have no obligation to educate them... if they lose bitcoins it wasn't because of us, but rather them. They should have known not to trust coins without fully syncing, or to give someone private keys, or to copy paste dumped private keys to some cloud service with "password1234" as their password. Not our fault, their fault."

However, I think that Core should rather say "Hey, you're the new guy around here. Here's a nice little tour of the place. We've got your addresses right here, but you don't need those yet, as we can't verify anything you did with them even if you tried. In order to do that, you need to wait x hours and download approx. y GB. If that doesn't sound cool, we could turn on SPV mode if you want. How about that?"

Unfortunately, that kind of tutorial does not exist in the app itself, and the SPV mode is not there. So the very least that could be done rather quickly, is hide addresses from the UI.

I don't understand why hiding addresses that have 0 use to a newbie (until he can see the transactions) is such a big deal?

Anyone who's not a new person can just getaddress to their hearts content in the console.while syncing.

Being aware of the problem at hand, and refusing to do anything about it is the same as implicitly stating "we want users to send large quantities of bitcoin into a Core address on their wallet so they are forced to either sync fully, or do unsafe things at the advice of internet forums."

Wallet suggestion: Hide receive addresses until fully synced. #7235

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