@theymos, you once mentioned the possibility that private forum messages belonging to Satoshi will one day be published, is there any chance of that happening now or in the near future?
The initial comment from yheymks was that he potentially wohkdftekease those messages in 8 years, which would have been 2021, but later on theymos confirmed he would not be releasing those messages afterall;
I've rethought this, and I won't be releasing the PMs in 2021. I'm convinced that nobody will ever identify Satoshi no matter what info comes out, so I'm not worried about that, but I am concerned about the privacy of those who communicated with him. For example, kiba once said that he tried to send a gift to Satoshi, but Satoshi declined (reportedly saying something like "I already have plenty of BTC"). If the PMs for this exchange exist in the database and hypothetically look like this:
kiba: Hey, I know it's worth peanuts, but do you want a gift of 10k BTC?
satoshi: lol, no thanks scrub
Then it would put a big target on
kiba's back. (This is only a hypothetical example: in reality, kiba never published the amount he offered Satoshi, if any amount was even specified.) Even if I screened the PMs in advance for obvious stuff like this, it's impossible to find everything. Eg. maybe someone who talked to Satoshi was trying to be anonymous, but people are able to find him just based on his writing style or knowledge.
I do think that there could be historically-relevant info in there, so maybe if Bitcoin has taken over the world in like
50 years and historians are clamoring to know more about its history, I or my successors could be convinced to revisit the issue. Or maybe not; don't get your hopes up. (I still haven't read the PMs, BTW; maybe they're all really boring.)