Shoud I be suprised that the wold's largest bitcoin address is linked to silk road?
I'm not. I remember somebody already having said that he traced his Silk Road deposit directly to the large address. This just confirms it for me.
I've been looking at the huge list of transactions to and from the Silk Road wallet, trying to see how they can be making so much, comparing the amount they're able to stash in the large address with the throughput of the wallet, and found:
between Fri Jul 6 20:29:49 2012 and Tue Jul 10 16:26:45 2012 there was 63142.39 in and 58582.22 out; 8000 got stashed in big address
between Tue Jul 10 16:26:45 2012 and Wed Jul 11 18:40:54 2012 there was 26326.63 in and 18640.54 out; 7000 got stashed in big address
between Wed Jul 11 18:40:54 2012 and Thu Jul 12 05:21:21 2012 there was 11764.01 in and 4044.89 out; 7000 got stashed in big address
between Thu Jul 12 05:21:21 2012 and Wed Jul 25 19:32:10 2012 there was 212223.51 in and 203620.82 out; 10000 got stashed in big address
between Wed Jul 25 19:49:16 2012 and Fri Jul 27 18:31:12 2012 there was 36245.63 in and 30816.23 out; 6000 got stashed in big address
i.e. nothing very consistent. I was hoping to see that a fixed percentage of the throughput was being stashed away, which would make sense if it was commission they were charging. Probably they're just moving excess coins to cold storage on an ad hoc basis to keep them safe. It doesn't necessarily represent "profits", just coins they're holding which aren't likely to be needed soon. The majority of it could well belong to their customers, just sitting around in customer accounts waiting to be spent or withdrawn.
Does anyone remember when the big Silk Road scam happened? One of their big traders had a "sale" and ended up running off with everyone's money, but when?
Side note: it might not be wise to trust me too much; what if I'd actually sent coins to Pirate?
Luckily, the methods used were fairly scientific, and anyone can replicate them.
But if you had sent them to pirate, the address would be in the "pirate cluster" of addresses. There are 'only' 1138 addresses in his cluster at the moment. He once posted that 1PSf86KnLuzM7Ris5kDhTEZwooR3p2iyfV is in the gpumax wallet. From that znort's code finds 1138 addresses from his live wallet, from which the weekly interest payments are made.
. Also the .com seems to indicate it is on purpose. 
