Steal a banknote, nobody's going to find it.

Steal enough banknotes and the bank will go to great lengths to find you. The Northern Bank robbery stole a significant fraction of all NB notes in circulation, so the bank re-issued them, relying on the impossibility of the criminals laundering them before the swap deadline.

https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/northern-ireland/the...

Governments are unlikely to give cryptocurrencies the same legal privileges as the currencies they issue.

As such, traceability will remain a risk for anyone receiving cryptocurrency payments. If a chain analysis reveals an illegal transaction as a precursor, it's going to be considered stolen goods, not money, as the article states.

> Governments are unlikely to give cryptocurrencies the same legal privileges as the currencies they issue.

That's fine, but if the governments don't take action it'll be up for the courts to decide that.

>it's going to be considered stolen goods, not money, as the article states.

This is not at all obvious. It's not even clear that the nemo dat rule would apply to any kind of ransom payment.

Untraceability sidesteps getting courts or lawmakers to give you legal status as money. I don't see why governments have any motivation to extend this protection to cryptocurrencies as it would seem to mainly facilitate crime without providing any benefit in terms of encouraging adoption of government controlled currency.

>I don't see why governments have any motivation to extend this protection to cryptocurrencies

The governments don't need to do this, the courts do. There's an existing principle they could very cleanly apply here.