I've rethought this, and I won't be releasing the PMs in 2021. <>
I am concerned about the privacy of those who communicated with him. For example, kiba once said <>
Would you consider releasing satoshi's PMs with the sender/recipient anonymized? For example, if kiba exchanged PMs with satoshi, you could change "kiba" to a random handle. It would not necessarily need to be a random string in order to allow for readability. You could also redact things such as names, addresses, bitcoin addresses, email addresses and similar. When discussing amounts of coin an individual has, you could redact the specific amounts. You could also only release PMs that were received by satoshi up to x time after he last logged into his account, as I am sure that a lot of crazy things have been sent to satoshi since he left the forum.
If it's PM between 2 regular/unknown users which released for historical purpose, it's good enough. But since it's PM between Satoshi and other user who could be targeted, there are few ways to identify the other user, such as
1. Date/Time of the PM.
2. Writing style.
3. Typo which rarely occurred (such as "covfefe").
I don't think any of those would necessarily identify a user. At least not with any amount of certainty. Also, the reason why someone might be targeted is not that they were talking with satoshi, it would be because someone might be able to infer how much coin they have, and the redactions I proposed should remove that risk.
I think if Satoshi never requested any of his PMs to become public ever after a certain amount of time, or god forbid his IP history, then wipe them all..
IIRC, theymos has said in the past that satoshi always used tor to access the forum. So any IP logs would be from what was at the time tor exit nodes.