Except the law isn’t talking about the private key or the encryption or the math, it is talking about what they are using those things for.

You are focusing on the numbers themselves and the math, but that isn’t the important part. This would be like someone getting arrested for check fraud and then trying to argue, “they are just a bunch of lines on a paper in a certain format, how can that be a crime!”

The crime isn’t that arrangement of ink on the paper, the crime is using those lines on the paper to commit fraud. Same thing here, it isn’t the numbers or math that are criminal, it is using those numbers and math to commit crime.