This isn't entirely new. At least we've already known prior to this that Adam Back had correspondence with Satoshi Nakamoto.
But I'm a little bit surprised that Satoshi was already ready for Bitcoin's whitepaper release when he/she/they learned of Wei Dei's B-money. I thought Wei Dei's early work played a vital role early on while Satoshi was still conceiving Bitcoin. If not for Adam Back, Bitcoin would have been created entirely oblivious of B-money.
I have this suspicion that Satoshi wasn't well-connected with the rest of the gang. Of course, there wasn't only The Cryptography Mailing List, that Satoshi was part of, where the development of an electronic cash is abundantly discussed. There were several other lists. Satoshi might not be part of many of those.
Unlikely to happen in my opinion, Adam probably don't have a direct or physical contact with Satoshi so it's unlikely that they're going to get something out of him, plus he's a cypherpunk meaning that even if he does know about the identity of Satoshi, there's no way that he would reveal it because he's an advocate of cryptography and privacy and revealing the identity would be a serious problem or flaw in his principle which I don't think he'll break anytime soon just for everyone to know who's the person behind the identity, and the email that Satoshi used is basically anonymous so there's no tracing back to who's behind the email.
It has actually surprised me that a good number of solid Cypherpunks have actually revealed their identities. While they're strong advocates of privacy, they're not actually hiding or working in the shadows. The likes of Adam Back, Wei Dei, Hal Finney, Nick Szabo, and others are public. Even the Cypherpunk's Manifesto was written by Eric Hughes. Eric's co-founders of the Cypherpunk movement, Timothy May and John Gilmore, are also personally known.
And they're also not just communicating online and anonymously. They also had face-to-face meetings. I wonder if Satoshi, albeit unknown, turned up even once. Of perhaps one of them is indeed Satoshi.
