i remember you saying you can tell alot from the nonce. if you mean lack of difficulty to imply that there was only 1 miner for the majority of 2009. well that wont work because "difficulty" was only implemented in version 0.2 on december 16th and the first jump happened december 30th 2009. so before december 16th many people could mine at the same rate without any speedbumps ...which many did.