Earlier this month, a group of people met over dinner in Blantyre to talk about Bitcoin. It was not a formal affair. There were students, a few people who had travelled from Lilongwe, and a representative from the Mayor's office. In December, the city will host the fifth Africa Bitcoin Conference, the first time the event has left its usual West and East African circuit.
Within days of the Mayor speaking publicly about it, the accusations arrived. 'He knows nothing about blockchain'. 'He is being used by thieves'. 'This is a Ponzi scheme'. 'This is money laundering dressed up in technical language.'
Let me start with something that may surprise you, perhaps even sound controversial, given that I write about Bitcoin: those reactions are not stupid. They are what a reasonable person concludes from the evidence available to them.
The sceptics are reasoning correctly from bad data
If most of what you have ever encountered under the banner of "crypto" has been a WhatsApp group promising to double your money, a referral scheme, or a friend who lost their savings to a trading platform that stopped answering messages, then "scam" is not prejudice. It is an accurate generalisation from your sample.
And the sample is genuinely bad. Mirror Trading International, one of the largest investment frauds in South Africa's history, marketed itself precisely as a Bitcoin opportunity. It promised returns of up to 10 per cent a month, drew in around 280,000 investors worldwide, and collapsed in December 2020 when its chief executive disappeared. The Registrar of Financial Institutions at the Reserve Bank of Malawi has warned the public, in a statement reported by MBC and Face of Malawi, to be "sceptical of informal financial groups that require you to bring subsequent members", often in exchange for registration or "training" fees. We have lived through Cashgate, which a former Governor of the Reserve Bank described in 2017 as "the worst tragedy this nation has witnessed in modern times." We do not need lessons in how money disappears.
So if you are sceptical, I am not asking you to stop. I am asking you to be sceptical about the right thing.
What is actually being alleged?
A Ponzi scheme has a precise definition. There is an operator. That operator collects money from new participants and uses it to pay earlier participants, while claiming the money came from some productive activity. The scheme requires a continuous inflow of new money and collapses when withdrawals exceed deposits.
So here is the first question worth sitting with: if Bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme, who is the operator? Who receives your money? Who promises you a return? Who can be arrested when it collapses?
Bitcoin has no company, no chief executive, no registered office, and no marketing department. Nobody takes custody of your money in the way a scheme operator does. Nobody promises you anything. There is no dividend, no monthly percentage, no guaranteed yield. Its software is public and anyone can read it. In seventeen years it has never stopped producing blocks.
None of that means Bitcoin will make you money. It very well might lose you money. But notice that these are two different accusations, and people routinely collapse them into one. "This might fall in value" and "this is a fraud designed to take your money" are not the same claim, and they require different evidence.
The confusion usually happens because the thing that took your cousin's money was not Bitcoin. It was a platform, a trader, or a person who used the word Bitcoin. The distinction matters in the same way that the distinction between the kwacha and a fraudster who asks you to send kwacha matters.
What I think Bitcoin advocates should say more often
If I only told you the above, I would be doing exactly what I have accused others of doing. So hear this... Bitcoin is volatile. It has fallen by more than seventy per cent from its peak on several occasions. Anyone who tells you it only goes up is either ignorant or selling something.
Bitcoin transactions are final. If you send to the wrong address, or if you are tricked, there is no reversal, no call centre, and no ombudsman. This is a genuine structural difference from the systems you already use, and I think Bitcoin advocates in Malawi, myself included, have been too quick to wave it away.
Self-custody is a real burden. If you lose your keys, your money is gone permanently. There is no branch to visit with your national ID, and no one to show a screenshot of what you had. It is simply gone.
And in Malawi specifically, cryptocurrencies are not legal tender, there are no locally licensed exchanges, and the Reserve Bank, according to Nyasa Times, has urged extreme caution when dealing with "self-proclaimed cryptocurrency educators, trainers, advisors, entrepreneurs and firms", because the credibility of their claims cannot be verified. I am a self-proclaimed Bitcoin educator. The Reserve Bank is right. You should not take my word for anything. That is exactly why I am writing this.
So why does anyone here bother?
Not because Bitcoin is exciting, but because of arithmetic.
Malawi's headline inflation stood at 20.01 per cent in August 2026, according to the National Statistical Office, the seventh consecutive monthly decline and down from 28.2 per cent a year earlier. That improvement is real, and it is worth acknowledging. But consider what the preceding years did to savings. Inflation was 32.2 per cent in 2024 and 28.5 per cent in 2025. The kwacha was devalued by 25 per cent in May 2022 and by a further 44 per cent in November 2023. Foreign exchange reserves have remained below one month of import cover, and the current account deficit stood at 19 per cent of GDP in 2025, according to the African Development Bank.
If you held one hundred thousand kwacha in cash through that period, you did not lose it to a thief. You lost it to a process. You will probably agree that in 2020, groceries worth 200,000 kwacha went a long way and would last. Today, you are lucky if the same amount covers half your needs for the month.
This is the honest case for why a Malawian might want a savings instrument that no government can print more of. Not "get rich quickly." Not even "get rich." Simply: an asset whose supply cannot be expanded by decision.
But here I must also say something to those already persuaded, because overclaiming is how this argument gets lost. A Bitcoin conference will not create forex. Malawi's foreign exchange shortage exists because we import considerably more than we export, and no technology resolves that by being discussed in a conference hall. When the Mayor spoke about jobs and forex, the person who replied "which jobs, which forex?" was asking a legitimate question, and it deserves a specific answer rather than an indignant one. Bitcoin can plausibly reduce the cost of receiving money from abroad and offer a hedge against currency debasement. It does not manufacture exports. Anyone who tells you otherwise should be trusted less, not more.
A mirror worth looking into
At the end of the first quarter of 2023, there were around 10.9 million mobile money wallets in Malawi, compared with 1.2 million bank accounts. In the same period, the Malawi Communications Regulatory Authority estimated, as reported by Semafor, that Malawians were losing roughly 120 million kwacha every month to mobile money scammers.
Nobody concludes from this that Airtel Money is a Ponzi scheme. We understand, correctly, that the fraud is committed by people misusing a system, not by the system itself. Why do we not extend the same reasoning to Bitcoin?
There is an honest answer, and it is not flattering to my own position: with mobile money there is a company, a regulator and sometimes recourse, and with Bitcoin there is none. I hate to admit it, but that is a real difference. If that is your objection, however, then your objection is about consumer protection and regulation, which is a serious and answerable argument. It is a different argument from "the technology is fraudulent," and it would be better for everyone if we had the first argument instead of the second.
Questions to carry with you
If someone approaches you about Bitcoin, ask them these. They will separate the educators from the predators quickly.
Are you promising me a return? Am I paid for recruiting other people? Do you take custody of my money, or do I hold it myself? Can I withdraw the full amount today, without notice and without a fee for leaving? Can you explain what happens if you disappear tomorrow? Who regulates you?
If the answers are unsatisfactory, walk away. You will not be rejecting Bitcoin but you will be rejecting a scheme... and you should.
But if you have concluded that Bitcoin is a scam, I would gently ask you to apply the same rigour to your own position. Can you state what Bitcoin is without using the word scam? Can you name who profits when you buy it? Do you know the difference between Bitcoin and the platform your cousin used? And would you, in 2012, have said the same thing about sending money by phone?
What I actually want
I am not asking you to buy anything. I hold the view that Bitcoin is one route towards financial autonomy, and I am aware that I could be wrong about that. What I am not willing to accept is that we should arrive at December, host a continental conference in our own city, and have the national conversation consist of one half shouting "Ponzi" and the other half whispering "you will be rich."
I think both are wrong, and both are lazy. And both leave Malawians unable to protect themselves, because a person who believes it is magic and a person who believes it is fraud are equally easy to defraud.
A technology becomes safe in a country when ordinary people understand it well enough to interrogate it. That is what I want.
Disagree with me if you like, but be able to say why.