Yea, we still haven't gotten easier since nenold withdrew his 1000 cores.
That's because he never had them to begin with. Mainly because there are some members on this forum that have triple his claimed resources and they know how much he should be really generating if he did have that setup going for that long.
No, he had something. Otherwise the difficulty wouldn't have increased so significantly.
I still don't believe it though, mainly from a logistics standpoint. I won't argue if he has 85K BTC but you can go back in time on all the blocks here
http://nullvoid.org/bitcoin/statistix.php and with a good spreadsheet and knowledge of how fast they are created (creation times are all there), he would have to created every *single* block (meaning not a single person was getting one) for 11 days straight 24/7
Further evidence is since he claims to have turned it off, the difficulty still has not changed. So either the interest in Bit Coin has grown to a level that the difficulty will naturally remain that high or someone else has filled in his place for block generation with another large server farm setup. 85K BTC is like sitting on over $4,200 USD which unless he had free server time, would have cost him nearly $33,000 USD for the 11 day sprint (with no competition from anyone else mind you) if he was using the Amazon Cloud Computing like he claimed.
And to top it off, say he did spend the $$$ to place a 1,000 core server farm at his fingertips, that's still small in comparison to the total amount of CPU out there generating Bit Coins, so he would be lucky to get 1 in every 10 blocks that way, further making it take over 110 days to generate that much BTC at a cost of nearly a half-million dollars of CPU time.
The numbers don't add up for his feat in my opinion unless he had a 100,000 core server farm setup for free. I would place my bets on that he was just blowing smoke.