This is very interesting in the light of "Satoshi owns 1 million coins" myth that is being brought up so often . It seems like Satoshi was against concentration of big amounts of coins in one hands, so this might mean 2 things:
1. Satoshi didn't mine any disproportionate amounts of coins, there were many early miners that we don't know about.
2. Satoshi did mine big amounts of early coins, but he destroyed them or don't plan to spend them in any way.
The former is possible.... there's been some analysis about this. Apparently,
Hal Finney stated that he mined one of the first 100 blocks. Per the same article, the hash rate stayed constant around 5 MH/s for the first six months after genesis. I suppose that suggests there weren't many other early miners.
That author concludes:
Based on the above, I find it reasonable to assume that most of the hashing power in the first year or so of Bitcoins existence came from Satoshi Nakamoto. If real users were actually joining and leaving Bitcoin, one would expect the hash rate to have varied a lot more, particularly in the first six months. Starting in early 2010 the network hash rate does start increasing rapidly, suggesting thats when the real serious users started using (and mining) Bitcoin.
I think it makes sense to assume the Satoshi coins number somewhere in the millions. Pinpointing a number would be a futile exercise. Let's hope those keys were destroyed.
