Quote from: bittheodds on May 15, 2013, 08:47:37 AM

In the last 24h I read a lot of posts here and elsewhere about how the DHS actions were tantamount to an attack on bitcoin, that the government wanted bitcoin dead, etc.

Well, the government might want to see bitcoin dead, I don't debate that, but I really don't think the DHS actions were an 'attack on bitcoin' either.

First, the account 'seized' by the DHS were only the Dwolla ones, specifically the ones used to transfer back and forth MtGox. If the DHS wanted to take down bitcoin, they'd take out Gox, and would have not limited their operations to 'just Dwolla'. They would have seized all the Mutum Sigillum LLC assets instead, or at least canned the Coinbase accounts, too. They did not.

Second, if you observe how the DHS work, you'll notice they regularly announce their ops to the media. They love nothing more than waving their dicks around, justifying their large budgets and salaries. If this had been a concerted effort to 'take down bitcoin', you'd have read several press releases already about how Homeland Security protected the US citizens from the evil of the islamo-fascist currency 'bitcoin'. They'd be a story or two about SR, about a guy buying a gun and shooting his child in the head, or about terrorists buying ricin. Something. There was nothing.

So what happened? Well, no one really knows but I suspect some criminal was laundering money through dwolla into bitcoins, then back from gox. As part of their routine operations DHS seized the accounts to make sure no more money could be 'lost' in the laundering process. And if you're wondering what this has to do about Homeland Security, well, DHS deals with all sorts of things - yesterday top story from their infrastructure report was a sewage plant spill for example: http://www.dhs.gov/dhs-daily-open-source-infrastructure-report

Agreed, government got to much things to worry about then sabotaging Bitcoin.