Why Bitcoin alone won't fix Pakistan's economy

The guest Muzamil had been asked to book for months

The episode opens with Muzamil acknowledging, with some amusement, that his audience had been pushing him to invite Ahmad Manzoor for a long time. The requests had piled up, messages had gone unanswered for a while, and when Ahmad finally replied it was with full enthusiasm. The reason the audience wanted him is plain: Pakistan had been gripped by a crypto wave, Bitcoin talk was everywhere, and people needed someone who actually understood the technology rather than just the price chart.

Ahmad Manzoor arrives not as a hype man but as a systems architect. He has spent more than two decades building ICT infrastructure - data centres, smart city projects, network design across Pakistan, Dubai, and Europe - and he came to blockchain not through speculation but through a long-standing question he kept asking in professional circles: why are we building digital systems that still depend on centralised third parties?

A career built on networks, not noise

Before the conversation reaches Bitcoin, Ahmad walks Muzamil through a career that reads like a map of Pakistan’s technology sector. He graduated in computer science, landed his first job through a chance encounter at a meeting in Gulberg, Lahore, and spent years moving through companies including PTCL Infotech, working on network architecture and data centre design. He describes himself as someone who cannot sit still once a problem is solved - his happiness lasts two days, his frustration lasts one, and then he is already looking for the next thing.

He also mentions a habit that shaped his thinking: reading for at least one hour every night. He traces a focus problem from childhood that his father - an engineer - identified early and helped him channel into deep, sustained study of whatever subject he was pursuing. That discipline, he says, is what allowed him to go from networking to blockchain to AI without losing the thread.

Why Bitcoin’s price is the wrong question

When Muzamil steers the conversation toward what most of the audience actually wants to know - can you make money from Bitcoin? - Ahmad is direct. “You can never predict whether Bitcoin will go up or down,” he says, citing a documentary called Rise of Bitcoin in which one of the most prominent figures in the space says exactly that. “Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying to you.”

His deeper point is structural. Bitcoin, he explains, does not generate wealth - it redistributes it. “The way you make money on Bitcoin, someone will have to lose that money.” He uses the analogy of a field: real wealth is created when you plant seeds and harvest fruit. A speculative asset with a fixed supply and rising demand simply moves money from late entrants to early ones. The person who bought in 2017, watched the price climb, told all their friends, and then watched it crash - that person did not lose money to the market in the abstract. They lost it to whoever sold at the top.

He describes a pattern he has watched repeat: a bull run begins, people invest money they cannot afford to lose, they borrow from family, the market crashes, and then they go silent for up to three years because they are too embarrassed to admit what happened. “Most people who lose money in crypto,” Ahmad tells Muzamil, “were told by someone in their family not to invest. And then they did anyway.”

Mining pools and the centralisation problem

One of the sharper technical arguments in the conversation concerns Bitcoin mining. Ahmad explains the proof-of-work mechanism clearly: miners are essentially verification machines, racing to solve a computational puzzle. The first to solve it broadcasts the answer, 51 percent of the network confirms it, and the winner receives newly minted Bitcoin. The more computing power you have, the faster you solve the puzzle, the more you win.

The problem is that individuals with single machines realised they could not compete. So they formed pools - combining computing power to increase their collective chances of winning, then splitting the reward. “When pooling happens,” Ahmad explains, “the winners are whoever controls the most computing power.” A small number of massive mining operations, most of them in a handful of countries, now dominate Bitcoin’s supposedly decentralised network. The original vision - a peer-to-peer currency that gave every participant an equal chance - has been quietly hollowed out.

This is not a minor footnote. It is, Ahmad argues, the reason that simply adopting Bitcoin as a national currency or a savings vehicle misses the point entirely. The infrastructure underneath it has already been captured by large players.

What blockchain actually does - and why Pakistan needs it

Ahmad is careful to separate Bitcoin the speculative asset from blockchain the technology. He describes blockchain as a distributed ledger: a record that is simultaneously held by many participants, where every entry is verified by the network and cannot be altered without the consensus of the majority. No single party controls it. No single party can corrupt it quietly.

He then walks Muzamil through a series of concrete applications. Land records are perhaps the most vivid. In Pakistan, property disputes are endemic partly because records are held by a patwari - a local official - whose ledger can be altered, lost, or manipulated. “If a land token cannot be transferred until the transaction is verified on the blockchain,” Ahmad says, “you do not need to go to the patwari. You do not need to bribe anyone. The record is the record.”

He makes the same argument for educational credentials, health records, tax collection, and government subsidies. On subsidies in particular, he is pointed: the government currently distributes cash or goods without knowing how they are used. A programmable digital token - one that can only be spent on food, or medicine, or school fees - would make leakage structurally impossible. “The government gives subsidies with its eyes closed,” he tells Muzamil. “It has no idea who is using them or how.”

The Karachi bank story - and what it reveals about financial fraud

Later in the discussion, Ahmad shares an incident from Karachi that he describes as formative. A software engineer at a bank, earning a modest salary, suddenly acquired a car, then a house, within months. Colleagues noticed. The bank investigated. What the engineer had done was elegant in its simplicity: every transaction processed by the bank involved a decimal point, and he had written a small script that redirected the fractional amounts - the figures after the decimal - into his own account. On any individual transaction the theft was invisible. Across millions of daily transactions, it was a fortune.

When the bank discovered what had happened, they did not fire him. They hired him, paid him three crore rupees for the system, and asked him to teach them how it worked. The story is not just entertaining. Ahmad uses it to make a point about the vulnerability of centralised financial systems: a single person with access to the code can manipulate the entire structure, and the manipulation may not be visible until enormous damage has been done. Blockchain, by distributing verification across thousands of nodes, makes this category of fraud structurally much harder.

Digital currency, programmable money, and the China model

Muzamil asks about central bank digital currencies - the idea that governments might issue their own digital money rather than simply tolerating or banning private cryptocurrencies. Ahmad is enthusiastic, and he points to China as the most advanced example. China first built WeChat into a payment infrastructure used by hundreds of millions of people, then used that installed base to introduce its own digital currency. The sequence matters: you build the habit, then you issue the instrument.

He describes a feature of programmable digital currency that he finds particularly powerful: expiry. A government could issue digital tokens with a 15-day spending window. If you do not spend them, they expire. This forces consumption, stimulates the economy, and prevents hoarding - all without any enforcement mechanism beyond the code itself. “Consumption equals growth,” Ahmad says. “If you can direct where and when money is spent, you can manage an economy in ways that were never possible before.”

He also returns to the subsidy argument here, connecting it to the token model. Rather than giving a poor family cash that might be spent on anything, a government could issue tokens redeemable only at specific vendors for specific goods. The vendor scans the token, the transaction is recorded on the blockchain, and the subsidy is accounted for in real time. No middleman. No leakage. No corruption.

Quantum computing, the 2035 problem, and why security must be rebuilt now

One of the more forward-looking sections of the conversation concerns quantum computing. Ahmad tells Muzamil that current predictions place quantum processors in consumer devices by around 2035. The implication for cryptography is serious: the encryption protocols that currently secure blockchain networks - including the SHA-256 standard - were designed for classical computing. A sufficiently powerful quantum computer could break them.

“The security goes first,” Ahmad says, “and then everything built on top of it has to be rebuilt.” His point is not that blockchain is doomed but that the security layer needs to be upgraded ahead of the transition, not after it. The organisations and governments that begin building quantum-resistant cryptographic protocols now will be positioned to maintain secure systems through the transition. Those that wait will face a period of genuine vulnerability.

He connects this to Pakistan specifically: the country has an opportunity to build its blockchain infrastructure on next-generation security standards from the beginning, rather than inheriting legacy systems that will need to be replaced.

Pakistan is not late - it is exactly on time

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil asks Ahmad where he sees Pakistan in 30 years. The answer is optimistic but grounded. Ahmad points to Pakistan’s geographic position - at the intersection of major trade and energy corridors - as an underappreciated strategic asset. He mentions that the serious application layer built on blockchain technology only began developing after 2015, meaning the window for building foundational infrastructure is still open.

“We are not behind,” Ahmad says. “The world is still doing research. Our problem is that we think short-term.” He is critical of a tendency he sees in Pakistani professional culture: chasing certifications and social media metrics rather than building deep expertise. He describes watching people complete social media marketing courses and immediately declare themselves experts, when the real work - understanding the underlying technology, thinking ten years ahead, building systems that will still be relevant when the landscape shifts - has barely begun.

His closing argument is essentially a call to seriousness. Pakistan does not need to copy Facebook or Google. It needs people who understand the infrastructure layer well enough to build something original on top of it. The blockchain application ecosystem is young enough that a small country with focused talent can still define what it looks like. “We can build our own,” Ahmad tells Muzamil. “Easily. The question is whether we will stop thinking short-term long enough to do it.”