all we really know for sure was that there were at least two blocks created between 03/Jan/2009 and 11/Jan/2009.
That's all we know for sure? We don't know that the next blocks were all minutes apart and there was hashing power at the very dawn of the network to maintain something close to 50BTC/10min? And your argument for completely ignoring this is "the timestamps may not be accurate"?
Ignoring??? I'm drawing what I'm saying precisely from there. The dates in my post are from the headline in the genesis block and from the public announcement. We don't actually know which blocks were when, because god knows how things were moved around and restructured while testing or in preparation for release.
You are drawing what you're saying from the time differential between blocks 0, a block that comes with the software, and block 1, the first block to presumably be mined either in anticipation of immediate release, or just after release.
From block 1 on, there is hashing power to maintain a near 50btc/10min, yet you continue to argue about the haziest of hazy possibilities other than occam's razor. And more technical gobbledygook "moved around and restructured while testing or in preparation". Maybe people's brain will fall asleep while reading that and assume that you're making sense.
PS - the announcement and the first blocks mined "in the wild" were on the 9th, not the 11th of January. But of course that ever devious satoshi cooked up a plan to make it look like he had enough hashing power for a difficulty of 1 on his own, and then to hide his tracks and make people not realize this, he manipulated the timestamps to make it look exactly like he had what he was trying to hide. BRILLIANT!
Still doesn't get within a factor of factor of four of the numbers I was disputing, and it's still a measurement on unrelated software.
It sure does bring the total hashing power of the network well within one person or a small group for the first 30k+ blocks, though.