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I agree that there is much to look at before jumping to a conclusion.
But I want to ask you again about your claim upthread that it is impossible that Satoshi accumulated anywhere near a million BTC. Unless I missed it, you've skipped over the request to explain why you believe this to be so.
sorry didnt have time spending hours redoing old research i just used my memory of the highlights i picked up. im sure google has the answers
but from what i remember, (forgive my memory for lack of detail)
logically for satoshi to accumilate 1mill in 2 years. there would have to be only 5 people mining right up to january 2011 because only 5mill were mined by then
(simple division)
but even before winter 2009 there were about 10 people..
Your logic works only if you can safely assume that one did not have significantly more hash power than others. Rational speculation, but inconclusive as a proof.
then the next point. satoshi was playing with new wallet.dat implementations. along with the fact that if you copied a wallet.dat and then later received 100 tx's... the active wallet.dat would have different addresses added to it thanks to the address pool and copying the backup back would lose addresses.
i remember he updated 0.3 to fix some wallet issues because addresses/coins were being lost. so the only way to have not lost any would have been to manually write down all the privkeys since day one prior to some of the bug fixes, to ensure he never lost a single coin..
Possible, but an unlikely reach. You can't envision a person (e.g.) appending a simple between 'wallet' and '.dat' in the filename?
i remember you saying you can tell alot from the nonce.
Yes, an analysis was performed of the nonce in each coinbase transaction for the first few years of Bitcoin. If one graphs the nonce against block height, one can clearly see interesting patterns therein. One of the patterns is a simple increment by one of the nonce for consecutive or near-consecutive* coinbase transactions. The sum of the coinbase transactions in these series came to (IIRC) ~960,000 BTC. I find this plausible evidence to assume that one entity scored darn near a million BTC in the early days of mining.
* near-consecutive, as other unrelated transactions -- including some with their own distinctive patterns in the same graphing -- are interspersed.
eta: Syke has located part of this evidence: