I was one of the first BTC adaptors, when the wallet worked as a miner. It was pretty wonky code-wise and would not be a surprise, if the Satoshi seeds just became unusable.

The security aspect was not very good, also the hard drives at the time broke up pretty casually, personally the program fried my Sempron processor and luckily stashed the HD to be found years later.

Surely the specialized chips changed the whole structure of a p2p currency, making it more centralized and with high transfer fees. Perhaps the person(s) had other wallets too, which means that there would be no need to touch the bigger pot, making the price to crash.