mculp

It was self-hosted. The only real hosting service ever on the darknet was Freedom Hosting, and its operator got busted (for having customers who hosted CP.)

"Centrally controlled" is not the same thing as one guy who has a very large stake.

Bitcoin, by definition, is not "centrally controlled." It doesn't matter how many coins any entity controls, there's nothing that it could do to actually break the system or remove the inherent value of bitcoin. The fact that there are thousands and thousands of miners and nodes around the world protecting the ledger (the blockchain) is what makes bitcoin so groundbreaking.

Just wanted to point out that Silk Road is also PHP spaghetti.

The point of parallel construction is that we don't know that it's at work.

I'd wager it's just the geographical center of the US.