I'm with you that the OP is off on his assessment... but in what way was a P3 "contemporary" to any period of Bitcoin's history? I have a stock 3.2 GHz P4 purchased from Dell in 2005. Prescott core, so a "later" model P4. It can do > 1000KH/s, and it was already obsolete by the time Bitcoin came around four years later. Hell, the Core 2 Quad Q9550 came out in Q1 of 2008, and it easily gets well over 10 MH/s. I'll grant you that the old client was poorly optimized, etc... But P3's were long obsolete even by 2009 standards, so it's rather misleading to claim those results as "contemporary".
Sergio's post at the end of page 3 hit the nail on the head. Gmax and D&T have a massive horse in this race and are in no way objective about this. He (gmaxwell) is using the same argument he used with me some 2 years ago in IRC. "ohh but the but the processors were so slow in 2009 there's no way it was just satoshi" even though the facts pretty much fly in the face of this. It's not like that crypto mailing list is very active. The bitcoin release had what, 15-20 replies from about 5 different people? Difficulty of 1 is 7MH/s and the average power between blocks 1-32k was
less than 7MH/s because the avg. block time was 13 minutes or so. The block time is fairly consistent from the beginning of that period to the end, indicating that about the same number of people who mined bitcoin from the start were the same group mining until a few more started coming on in around blocks 32-36k.
Arguing that satoshi had a lower bound hashrate of 14kh/s in 2009 based on the first two or three blocks? Incredibly naive for someone who has a deep understanding of bitcoin. I'd argue the intent of that post is entirely to deceive.