Hardly shoe #1, more like #8 or #9. With the take down of Liberty Reserve, the killing off of a number of exchanges and interfaces to exchanges, its pretty clear the US Government at least has decided to focus for a time on the financial infrastructure which underpins a big chunk of Internet criminal activity. The privacy advocates are getting somewhat caught in the crossfire.
As a company that works with internet advertisers, we see the shadowy parts of the web shimmering there on the periphery, lots of people are trying to scam Google out of some of its advertising revenue, it is a full time job to identify and quash fraudulent traffic here at Blekko, I know from experience that there are many folks at Google that do nothing but that.
But more than that, it says that these activities have reached the nation-state level of attention. Which puts the global losses in the 150 to 200 billion dollars annually.
The effect of that is what Patrick experienced where regulators start effectively 'regex' banning types of activities that are associated with these activities. It's a cold compress on an arterial bleed, not a solution but something to stem the blood loss while other measures are being taken.
It is really all about cash though. When crime doesn't pay, people don't do it. So focusing on making it hard to get paid is the strategy it seems to work on Internet criminal activity. If I had to bet I'd say that someone in the Treasury department has a goal of (ideally) making it impossible to use BitCoin to facilitate criminal activity, through a series of regulations requiring transaction reporting and verification, killing off exchanges that don't do that, and pressuring partners to do the same.