1. Satoshi mined almost alone from 1/3/2009 to 1/25/2010 (block 0 to block 36288).
He did not. I mined during that time so did many other people I've talked to. As you're probably aware the original software mined _very_ slowly, and contemporary hardware was slow. Heck even a fairly current machine with state of the art software can just barely do enough hashrate for difficulty 1. (and god, before more handout requests come: Bitcoin was worthless then, the software was annoying windows-gui only I ran it in wine+vncserver, and I didn't keep my original wallet)
Its nice when bad arguments are so easily falsified.
I would pay BTC1 for BTC1 from the genesis block.
The coins created by the genesis block are forever unspendable.