That's an interesting STEEM history lesson and I was recently looking for something like this to explain why I found an account that was farming STEEM from other accounts. (over 250)

To me, it looked like STEEM was given away during the account creation process as a POW stake, but your story suggests otherwise.

The only problem with a start like this is, these account handles will never be recovered, and the ones I found were very short common names that people could have used.

I'll continue with my research, and quote this article in my post when it eventually is released.