Whether or not you consider cryptocurrencies "progress" is irrelevant, because it's an emerging technology that exists whether you (or I) like it or not.
The cold, hard, unavoidable truth is this: Ransomware may be a Bitcoin problem, and it may not be. Either way, tough shit.
I mean not really. If we were to decide, as a country, that it was bad, we could take actions to stop its proliferation. The dollar-BTC transition points are chokepoints we could easily target to get started.
Banning things like this just turns them into another laundering opportunity - where there's money to be made there's a way.
In order to solve the ransomware problem, we create a new problem in the use of violence or the threat of violence in order to stop anyone from using crypto at all.
They are widely adopted and useful, yet their secondary harms warrant laws to be written.