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Mike,
someone bought the billet and they are making him a knife out of it, I am sure there will be a WIP thread about it.
Those guys also did a meteorite Damaskus WIP thread , the resulting knife...

I balieve the number of folds is 16 which means 65000 and some change layers for katana.
Recently one of the knife makers over at the Knife forums did 1 million layers, pretty cool stuff.
1 MILLION...

The reason for the folding the katana steel is to evenly distribute the carbon in the steel, as well as making the steel much stronger by adding layer structure.
Silver steel does not contain silver...