The first raid of this kind happened almost two years ago.

http://techland.time.com/2011/05/23/report-police-confuse-bi...

Except that miners aren't actually breaking any laws. But more importantly will be to see what how quickly the market floods with new coins and the impact that has on collectors.

ASICS wont make new coins arrive any faster - supply is fixed. But people with ASICS will get the highest proportion of new coins.

I think the point was that they are (potentially) using lots of electricity.

I imagine they use a decent amount, but not nearly as much as would be required to run a cluster of computers to mine a comparable quantity. I think with an ASIC, electricity costs are negligible compared to the output.

I'm not sure I follow, Bitcoins are mined at a rate of one block every 10 mins (on average). The difficulty setting adjusts based on how much processing power is thrown at the problem. Supply is constant.

If the difficultly increases after the coins are mined, then it would always be playing catch-up and actually a flood could occur.

It is my understanding (but I could be mistaken, there is a lot of FUD around BTC) that someone could in theory mine 500 hashes in a ten minute window then 'retire' having boosted the mining rate. This would not only net them a lot of bitcoins immediately but also restrict others supply of bitcoins.

Supply is roughly constant given a slowly increasing mining pool, supply isn't shock resistant.

The new generation of mining hardware uses a lot less electricity then the GPU-based ones of before.