I was simply curious if the 1m BTC that I'd heard about was instamined or if it was mined prior to announcement? Obviously there wasn't a short term incentive to liquidate if all or even a majority of the coins still exist.
In these futuristic times it's easy to forget that Bitcoin was a nothing from nowhere when it launched.
I'd definitely recommend reading a copy of Digital Gold by Nathaniel Popper. It gets boring later on, but it covers the very early days really well.
You get the sense that Satoshi would've been totally delighted if two or three other miners had joined in from minute one, let alone hundreds, but barely one single person gave a shit for months on end and there were periods where there were bursts of interest and then it went totally dead again.
He couldn't have attracted people to a dead network so it was down to him to keep it alive by mining solo for long periods hence the large number of coins he wound up with. For someone with his aims I'm sure he regarded every extra coin in his possession as a failure.
There was no premine. It was open to anyone from minute one. Hardly anyone but him cared.
That's one of the reasons why Bitcoin is so unique. A launch with that level of purity can never happen again.