Hi everyone,
before you stop reading as you think that you know the answer already, this is not a rethoric question - there is indeed a missing piece which I cannot find so far.
I was inspired by a post from 
It is unbelievable that this is just 3.5 years ago - so much has happened since then and yes, I admit that I am a little bit sad that I have not been here at the time.
I wanted to understand more and tried to find out which accounts belong together - I put hundreds of accounts into excel spreadsheets and in deed, the early miners which became whales were all using multiple accounts - to be precise they were even encouraged by 
steemit and blocktrades were two of the most active ones using dozens of accounts to mine. I do not want to judge on this behaviour, in the end it was the result of the decision of the founding team to avoid the legal consequences of an ICO.
In the beginning, roughly 95 pct of all newly issued Steem was issued to the miners. They had to solve a Proof of Work puzzle - and when they did that they were put in a cue. New Steem was than issued to these accounts in the order of the cue. You can see these PoW transactions in the early blockchain data.
When looking up this data I also ran across some other accounts of people, which appear rly were part of the early team or close to them. These accounts, however, got there massive accounts of Steem somehow differently - and this is exactly were my question comes into play. I simply cannot figure out how that worked.
One of these accounts is 
As you can see,
Do you know the answer and can help me? I would be glad to learn.
Many thanks in advance and best regards,
Tim