Representative Bill Foster (D-IL) sees the ransomware issue as potentially deadly for crypto's reputation before Congress.

Speaking at a virtual event hosted by Axios, warned of growing anti-crypto sentiment among lawmakers.

“I’m not there yet, but there’s significant sentiment in congress that if you’re participating in an anonymous crypto transaction that you are a de facto participant in a criminal conspiracy,” said Foster.

A member of the Financial Services Committee, Blockchain Caucus and the new working group on crypto, Foster is certainly in a position to know the prevailing wind.

In a response to a question from interviewer Dan Primack as to whether the recovery of the Colonial Pipeline ransom suggested that the Department of Justice had already solved that issue, Foster said:

“I have to speak very carefully here because our capabilities here are very classified. For a long time, we have had the ability to track bitcoin in a way that the bad guys didn’t fully appreciate. Obviously, that’s all changing.”

Huge government investment into cryptocurrency forensics and analytics, in other words, are still part of a race against increasingly savvy cybercriminals.

For these reasons, the extent to which a blockchain transaction can remain private or anonymous remains contentious among lawmakers, especially when it comes to the United States' considerations for issuing a digital dollar. Foster noted his consistent concerns with both fully decentralized digital assets and total government surveillance: