The fixation on Satoshi makes me a little sad. Bitcoin was created to create a system of money without trust and central control— all the salient features are in the system, not in the motivations or non-public activities of its creator... so this kind of research is just valuable as a historical novelty, not in any practical way.
Making Bitcoin available was a gift to the world, but we seem to be repaying it with a not stop effort at violating the privacy of someone who clearly prefers it, plus these analysis are seldom very accurate— in most cases it may just as well be someone else... and then some other poor slub gets accused erroneously of being Satoshi, and potentially endangered when mentally ill people make assumptions about the returns on kidnapping. ::sigh::
I do look at satoshi's blocks and separate them cleanly from the ones around them, keeping in mind, however, that I'm also looking at everyone else's blocks too. Other than satoshi, Hal, and Druid, I have not to date "identified" a single miner. I can only separate them and tell you that some blocks were mined by one person, and some blocks were mined by this other person, but no mix-matching.
I have no intentions to learn more about satoshi than we're supposed to, or to find out who mined which coins and who broadcasted which transactions. (In fact, for more than 80% of the miners I've found so far, it'd be damn near impossible.)
I give every miner either a pseudonym (like Hes, Dud, Bbz etc.) if they made a significant impact on the blockchain or a number (like UIM-12 or UIM-2485) if they mined a block and left forever. If those people want to step out and tell the world what they've mined, they can. It's not my decision.
I'd be less disappointed if the focus were just on early transactions, which are somewhat interesting on their own merits without the unnecessary game of pin the transaction on the person game.
I don't need to know who received 50 bitcoins from satoshi or 25 bitcoins from satoshi or whatever. I only want to learn what other things they've done on the blockchain, and keep them separate from other people's work.
I'm currently documenting all the transactions in the first 10,000 blocks. I'll probably have to set up a mediawiki to share all the knowledge.
And as for the purpose of all this, you hit the nail right on the head. It's a historical novelty, not a massive doxing operation.
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