So again, for this vulnerability you need to
- load a wallet from an archive by accident
- have the same special wallet you use
- run into malicious nodes that harvest that data
- use an IP that allows them to identify you...

And now the malicious person knows that individual A, living in south-east Paris, has had Bitcoins in his wallet a decade ago...
Now, what kind of thief watches day and night for people who might have had a few coins when they can simply watch for people who have coins!!!!!!
Never heard of a guy who was robbed because his family owned a Ferrari a decade ago, but plenty got robbed cause they were driving one!

I agree that having the old wallet info may be important but I believe the main thing to keep is an appropriate backup of the private keys or seed and not the wallet software. Years later, by error, donation or some unforeseen circumstance. An old address might be the recipient of funds. And if you don't have the keys. The funds may be permanently inaccessible. In other instances. Old addresses have come into use due to forks or other changes. On the other hand. If a wallet has been hacked. You should make an exception for it. As having or accidentally reusing a hacked wallet can pose another risk. So I really don't think it says much about never deleting anything under any circumstances. But rather never losing the keys to an address you need to control again down the road. A no brainer that will save you a lot of money and trouble.

Keeping odl things is Never been easy because these usually needs some extra protection of always have sensitive issue because sometime without checking peoples sold their old things which also give them headache but as mentioned if someone is having time and space then surely he needs to keep his things secure without having any trouble. Sometime back one of mine fiend lost password of his blockchain wallet he is now trying to recover but its not working even he is having phrase but its not working its almost six years but he is taking care because he feels still he can recover his coins which are now almost many time above his original investment but good thing about him he is still hopeful and have all things ready but bad thing is he is not able to have acces his wallet even doing many tricks hopes are alive and now with this advice surely its going to be have positive.

Just don't delete anything that have to do with the wallet so long as it has been funded before, even if it's just a few cents of dollars worth of coins that's left inside tomorrow, there could be a need for it. That's how I have viewed his message and those early bitcoin holders will understand it better base on their experience with bitcoin, and it's value over the years.

I do like this piece of advice and honestly I forgot he even said that but I remember reading it at some point in the past. It’s definitely some good advice to heed and you never know what will happen. Say bitcoin hits 10 million and suddenly that 20 or 30 bucks you forgot about in a wallet from 2017 becomes a small fortune! Good thing to know all past seed phrases when this potentially happens!

Yup. Self-custody is one of Bitcoin’s biggest strengths, but it also comes with responsibility. Losing your keys can mean losing access forever, so proper backups and key management are just as important as holding the coins themselves.

There are countless reasons why an old and abandoned wallet might become (very) valuable; although the probability of any specific reason materializing is usually low, the sum of these probabilities is high.
Thus, deleting a cryptocurrency wallet is equivalent to burning a physical wallet without looking inside it 

This is my first time seeing the advice from satoshi though, but from my instincts I have had the same thought about keeping wallets keys for future even it I don’t need to use the addresses at the moment, just incase of something that might happen in the future, I wouldn’t want to be part of people that would miss out in any donation or gift from someone who knows. And why delete wallet in the first place? It doesn’t profit one I anyway. My point is that if you really understand what you’re doing around bitcoin you do not need to be told not to delete things related to your wallet seeds, just because bitcoin was built to be decentralized.

I will admit I did not read every single post in this thread.  But I read quite a few.  What people seem to be missing regarding Satoshi's quote in this case is the context behind it.

"Sigh... why delete a wallet instead of moving it aside and keeping the old copy just in case? You should never delete a wallet."

When Satoshi made this quote the BIP39 Standard had not yet been proposed or adopted.  This quote was made pre September 2013.  Prior to the BIP39 Standard being adopted the bitcoin wallets did not have a seed phrase stored in them. They did not have a Master Private Key that all the child public addresses and child private keys were generated from.  The original bitcoin wallets as they existed in Satoshi's day simply generated random private keys and then the public receiving address that paired with that private key and this Public Key/Private Key pair was stored in the wallet.  I think the original wallets generated like 20 or 50 of these key pairs and then used them whenever you wanted to send or receive bitcoin.  Loss of these key pairs meant loss of your bitcoin.  There was no paper backup.  There was no seed phrase to write down.  All of that came with the BIP39 Standard that was adopted in 2013.  So when Satoshi talked about how to handle wallets that you were no longer using. His advice was to set them aside.  Keep a copy of them just in case.  Never delete them.  This advice stemmed from the fact that those wallets were the only place where the Private Keys existed to move your bitcoin. If you emptied a wallet and wasn't going to use it anymore then it was probably fine to delete it but just in case he suggested keeping an archive copy of it rather then delete it.  Just in case you had bitcoin that was returned to a a change address in that wallet and later you discovered this fact.  It would be nice if you could go back and retrieve your archived copy of the wallet and retrieve the bitcoin you discovered you accidentally left behind in that wallet.  Prior to BIP39 keeping up with your bitcoin was a real challenge! Each of the 20 or 50 addresses in each of those wallets had a different private key/seed phrase associated with each one of them. There was no single backup phrase that you could write down.

I just thought everyone should know why he recommended what he did.  Context makes all the difference!

Kresp Rowland

You can create a paper wallet or a digital wallet file, and wallet software applications can be uninstalled on your devices, no problem. The condition is you must make your wallet backups, and must make backups accurately without any mistakes like typos of your wallet seed phrase, because wallet backups are what you need most to recover your wallets later.

It requires you always test your backups to recover that wallet, to make sure that two wallets: original, and recovered wallets are the same. If this recovery test gives good result, you can fund that wallet and use it.

If you make multiple wallet backups and store them safely at different locations, probability of losing all wallet backups is really small. People got troubles and lost their bitcoins mostly because they did not make backups, or made backups that can not be used to recover later like typos.