Good call-out. Last year I spent a month to read every single known message from Satoshi and I do recall this. He was worried the attention from the government could kill the project at an early stage, but we are beyond that fear now. To your point about the project not being his, it’s true that the project has been passed on to new maintainers. But I’ve been thinking deeply about future threats to bitcoin and a big one is the threat of a fragmentation over a future controversial code change. That’s why it will become important to ossify the source code by getting people to treat the code as sacred (inspired by a divine prophet) which is how religions protected their texts from being mutated.
The other day I went to the bitcoin forum and looked up for satoshi's last interaction.
He didn't like the idea of bitcoin been used by wikileaks to find funding because it could bring bad PR to a project in development.
I guess he just realized that his project was not longer his.
Here is the article that he referenced one day before his last post.
https://www.pcworld.com/article/499375/could_wikileaks_scandal_lead_to_new_virtual_currency.html
Discussion
I don't share your view, good ideas always finds their path to light. Even if something like that happens bitcoin is bitcoin and nothing will change that.
I immediately thought of Martin Lutero facing centuries of church protection over the Bible.
No one should be treated as a prophet, that would only blind future bright minds.
Martin Luther did indeed break away from the Catholic church. Yet today, both Catholics and Protestants call themselves Christian and would stand up to defend Christian values. However, interestingly the Chinese government does not officially classify Christians as Christian - if you look at Chinese govt references they always classify people as Protestant or Catholic, in order to divide the Christian community.