> "Many [cryptocurrencies] are used, at least in a transactions sense, mainly for illicit financing."
Chainalysis, a firm that does compliance and criminal research professionally for governments, says that the total funds received by criminal entities is only 0.34% of all activity in crypto.[1]
Hopefully the department does its due diligence and realizes that rhetoric is diverging from reality.
[1]: https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/2021-crypto-crime-repor...
Your citation that it's "only 0.34%" is a somewhat dishonest distillation, because the report itself advises that the number is only for known criminal activity, and that the number is expected to rise over time as well.
What I would instead like to see, and that this report does not illuminate at all, is a breakdown of how all transactions looks. How many transactions are related to cryptocurrency-specific transactions, such as mixing coins or moving between hot wallets and cold wallets? How many transactions are related to speculation (e.g., trading one cryptocurrency for another)? How many transactions are associated with known entities, e.g. the Bitcoin address of an online (non-darknet) marketplace? How many transactions are unclassified?