The "Karpeles holding company" was a domain registrar which accepted Bitcoin as payments. The customer of the domain registrar? One Ross Ulbricht! Through an alias kept in an aliases file on his computer, using an email account to which his computer held the password.
There is no source on that because it isn't true[1].
Ulbricht was found via the server - all evidence that came as a result of that (including the laptop) would have been dismissed if a 4th amendment appeal was successful.
The only evidence found outside of the server chain was the posts to the Shroomery and Bitcointalk - and as the link in grandparent comment points out, this is not sufficient probable cause for a search warrant (and a search warrant on the Gmail in any case would still not have linked Ulbricht to DPR sufficiently)
[1] right in the second paragraph of article linked in grandparent comment:
> The arrest of Ross Ulbricht got its start when the FBI somehow discovered the real location of the Silk Road server in Iceland.
and
> Every shred of evidence except for two “hey, I found this site” posts derives solely from the server seizure.
That's a standard consumer chips though. The Xeon server line can, with the E7-8895 v2 do 15 cores per CPU and you can have 8 of them for a total of 240 hyperthreaded cores. I don't know what could take advantage of that and what the tradeoffs for scheduling etc. would be but Sun will sell you one: http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers-storage/servers/x8... -- 6TB of RAM.
True, but that is rather motherboard-design and core-stacking question. x86 CPUs are made for consumer use-cases, but that doesn't mean it can't be stacked almost linearly, like the Knights Landing CPUs.
a) market cap is meaningless for currencies - you want to look at transaction volume
b) you're comparing apples and oranges - the market cap for USD is not the total value of printed currency
c) btc transaction volume currently averages about $65M per day, which is $23.7B p.a - about 4x the size of the Apple App Store and about one-eighth of PayPal's $180B p.a and larger than all but the top 3-4 online payment providers
d) it is still very, very early days for btc. it's goal is to not replace PayPal, but to have these payment gateways build on top of it.
e) there are dozens of blockchain based applications currently in design, draft, development, beta test etc.
f) the current implementation of btc for payments is horrible yet despite that it has established itself as a viable payment backend with a non-insignificant portion of the market
g) comparing bitcoin with any fiat currency, let alone the worlds major reserve currency, is very flattering
