It doesn’t need to have a future value, it only needs to be able to be sold immediately. Thieves don’t stock up for the future, they’re looking for immediate payout. So they hack an exchange, steal some coins from the wallet, sell the coins (great news for the thieves due to the untraceable nature they don’t have to “fence” the coins for the usual 1/10 to 1/3 value, they can just go ahead and sell them at the current market price), now the thieves have the money and let somebody else worry about whether bitcoins will have any value tomorrow. The great news for thieves is there’s a good chance they can just go ahead and steal the coins from the people they sold them to, the whole thing is anonymous and they might even have sold them to the same place the stole them from.
With this kind of fat money on the table and a whole bunch of people involved who clearly don’t understand cyber-security this is the kind of situation hacker thieves dream about. The Mt Gox theft was at the Hans Gruber level, and nobody even needed a plan that included faking their own deaths.
Great food-for-thought. The traceability angle is the part that I failed to consider — that & the potential speed for flipping the theft.