It seems to me you either:
a) check each of the 100k addresses you own to see it if it funded, or
b) check each of the 3 million funded address to see if you own it
(a) is 30 times less work than (b) - so why would you do (b)?
I'm not very familiar with the client; I'm guessing this means you can bulk enter all your addresses and it automatically digs them for you?
I'm not even talking about how the client actually works, but theoretically, if you have 100k addresses and you know that 3 million addresses were funded, do you loop through the 100k addresses you own or through the 3m million that were funded?
How the client actually works is that you import your wallet, which causes all the private keys in the wallet to be imported into your CLAM wallet, and then it scans the whole blockchain looking for transactions which affect the addresses you own. It does so from the oldest to the newest block, and keeps a list of all the relevant transactions in order of transaction ID.
However, having said all that I suspect our digger may just be using this flag:
$ clamd --help | grep minimize
-minimizecoinage Minimize weight consumption (experimental) (default: 0)
It makes the client always spend the youngest outputs first. Since outputs funded in higher numbered blocks have less confirmations than those funded in lower numbered blocks it would have the effect of spending the outputs from the highest numbered blocks first.
Edit:
Indeed, we can't actually detect "digging" at all. All we can detect is when dug outputs move for the first time. It's quite possible that he already has 500k CLAMs in his wallet, and is just spending them one output at a time. In other words, "digging up old CLAMs" doesn't leave a mark on the blockchain. To dig all you do is import your old wallet.dat file into your CLAM client. Nothing hits the network until you move or stake those dug CLAMs, which is what we're seeing now.
Interesting. Although, if they were already all dug up, the block order that they are being moved in seems to make even less sense.
See above. I think we might simply be seeing the result of the -minimizecoinage flag.
To dig all you do is import your old wallet.dat file into your CLAM client. Nothing hits the network until you move or stake those dug CLAMs, which is what we're seeing now.
Which one is it? That is, is the dig-whale moving these CLAMS to new CLAM addresses or are you just seeing them stake?
All the transactions I've looked at have been spends, not staking transactions. I think he's probably moving the outputs to poloniex, one at a time.