The Department of Homeland Security has apparently seized Mt.Gox’s Dwolla account, a key US mobile payments account associated with the largest Bitcoin exchange. Mt.Gox has confirmed that their Dwolla account is disabled, but have not been party to the court order themselves.
Dwolla is an unregulated banking service, akin to Paypal. However, as they transfer funds directly from US bank accounts, rather than through Visa, they charge substantially lower fees. Mt.Gox are the largest bitcoin-to-dollar exchange, so Dwolla <>Mt.Gox was a very popular method of converting US dollars to and from the infamous digital currency, bitcoin. It was recently calculated that the equivalent of over 1 exaFLOPS (1000 petaFLOPS) of processing power are being used to ‘mine’ bitcoins i.e. performing the increasingly complex integer operations to find the bitcoin hashes. That’s more than 8 times the power of the top 500 supercomputers combined.
via MetaFilter http://www.metafilter.com/128089/First-they-laugh-at-you-then-they-send-in-the-Feds