Wow. This is crazy. This was only block 2247. I think this is the oldest coinburn I have seen ever.
This was on January 29 2009 and the first block ever was on January 8 2009. Wonder who else could of been mining around this time. Maybe it was that HDD guy who threw it away.
This is proof that all those estimates about "bitcoins lost forever" are inaccurate because you got transactions like this happening which many assumed it was a long lost private key. Many are estimating that around 3 Million bitcoins are lost this way but as you can see, these coins can wake up at anytime. Even Satoshi coins themselves could one day get spent. There is no proof that he lost his private keys or that he passed away.
It was January 3 rather than 8, right? I mean, block 0?
As to who was mining it, the choices go way beyond Satoshi and Hal and the HDD guy. There were already more than a handful of people who knew Bitcoin before Satoshi mined the Genesis block. The whitepaper was published more than a couple of months prior and it was already heavily discussed among peers. There were even those who knew about Bitcoin before the whitepaper was released. I mean, there must have been more than a dozen who joined the network merely days after it was launched. Dustin Trammell, for example, mined his first block days after Satoshi mined the Genesis block.