It’s around 1 am. I am sitting in bed with my laptop, writing code. My wife is asleep next to me while the keyboard rattles with occasional mouse clicks. Gunshots crackle through my noise-cancelling earphones. It’s the squatter camp across the river. Dogs bark. But the music in a distant tavern keeps thumping on. Dogs go quiet. Life goes on.
I’m in the zone. Al Green is presenting his case for Trump’s impeachment at the House of Representatives. It’s playing on the bottom left corner of my screen. He belongs to the era of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. He doesn’t speak; he sings. Thick black beard. Stern. Tall. He speaks with his arms and fists. And then he says something that makes me think, “Wait, yes, that’s where capital comes from.”
Like oxygen, capital is everywhere and needed by everyone. However, it is seldom understood. If you ask someone, they’ll tell you that capital is money. If you ask where money comes from, well, you enter a giant rabbit hole that we will explore in this post, beginning with a story better known as the Rustenberg Crypto heist.
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It’s 2018. I’m at home. My phone rings. It’s Justine, my financial advisor, announcing his arrival shortly. He’s short, stout, and wears a Hollywood haircut. Blond with a greyish beard. Energetic. We go through the usual boring stuff—retirement policies, life insurance, medical aid, bla bla bla. And then I say, “Justine, I’m not going to get rich at this rate. Give me something real! ” He looks at me with a frown, rubs his greying beard and pulls his lip into a smirk. “Okay, but this is not part of the formal work that I do, ok?” I nod. “Have you heard of Bitcoin?” My eyebrows gather. Then he says, “Look, you can make serious money there, bru!” He explains it, but it flies over me. Seeing my glazed eyes, he arranges a meeting with his friend, let’s call him Brad the Bitcoin guru. We agree to meet at my office, where a friend of mine joins.
Have you seen the movie Boiler Room? Ben Affleck, a dashing, rich stockbroker — square jaws — enters a boardroom full of hopeful would-be stock brokers. He missions to the head of the table, where one of them sits nervously. Affleck taps him on the shoulder and says calmly, “Sorry man, that’s my chair.” The freshman apologises and stands up, giving off a stench of embarrassment. Affleck pulls the chair, rolls it away and proceeds with the meeting, standing. Another freshman turns to the one who was just moved and says, “You idiot!” Affleck looks at him and says, “Get the fuck out of here!”
The tone is set. The big cheese has arrived. During his presentation, he tosses the keys to his Ferrari across the table and paces across the room. “People work for this firm for one reason: to become filthy rich… Anybody who tells you money is the root of all evil doesn’t have it… They say money can’t buy you happiness. Look at the fucking smile on my face!” The camera zooms in for a close-up. He’s clean-shaven, and of course, he’s not smiling. Well, the meeting with Justine and Brad is mildly similar. At some point, Brad tosses a gold coin with a giant B on its face across the table and says, “It’s real gold! Keep it!”
Two years later, now 2020, the movie Contagion goes viral. People are dying. Household incomes tumble. Governments scramble for vaccines and print mountains of cash to give away as grants and cheap loans, to keep the economy grinding. And just like that, there’s cheap money on the streets—lots of it. In finance, they call it dumb money.
Companies like Zoom, Netflix and OnlyFans boom. Zoom opens the year trading at around $80—$100 per share, hosting 10 million meetings per day. By April, two months later, they host 300 million meetings per day. It’s mostly dumb money poured into the stock market, which drives the share price up to $360. Netflix follows suit and grows by 70%. Headlines scorch the screens, and news anchors are dumbfounded. But somewhere in the financial underworld, Brad’s world, the stock market is boring.
The total market capitalisation of crypto grows from $180 billion to over $700 billion in one year. 300% growth. Bitcoin prices shoot through the roof, and then I remember that Justine mortgaged his home in 2019 and put everything into Bitcoin. It strikes me that he’s rich! I call him, but he doesn’t answer. Part of me wonders whether Covid killed him; another part thinks he is tucked away on some COVID-proof island, shielded by the iron dome of Bitcoin.
Covid restrictions relax. A friend comes over for a braai. Of course, he talks about Bitcoin. (We even called his newborn son Bitcoin) At this point, I’m listening attentively, trying to find some loophole to catch the wave. Then he says, “Bro! Have you heard about NFTs?” He struggles for his phone from his pocket — he gained covid weight — and taps on it to show me pictures of cartoons and apes. “Bro, people are buying these for thousands of dollars!” He shows me Twitter accounts of celebrities with NFTs. He explains and shows me the numbers. The NFT market had grown by 18,000%. My mind stutters, chokes and breaks down like an old car, and I say, “Bro! That doesn’t make sense at all.”
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Somewhere in the dusty streets of Rustenburg, Leo Cash and Carry (LLC), struggling to keep its doors open, is suffocating from Nedbank loans. They knock on Standard Bank’s doors and ask for a loan. Standard Bank says yes to extending a R40 million overdraft under three conditions: first, that their loans at Nedbank are held as collateral, second, that they move their transactional account to Standard Bank, and third, that they pay R10 million into a money market account as collateral. They pay R16 million. The deal is done. Champagne.
And then LLC withdraws R10 million from its new overdraft to pay off its loans at Nedbank. Eyebrows gather into a frown at Standard Bank. They just borrowed from Peter to pay Paul. Before the floors dry from the champagne party, FINSURV, an investigative department of the South African Reserve Bank (SARB), files a notice to freeze LLC’s assets at Standard Bank on account of an investigation involving crypto.
(LLC allegedly borrows money from banks, buys cryptocurrencies in South Africa and moves them to exchanges in other countries. It’s like buying a painting worth millions in South Africa, sticking it in a private jet, flying to another country and then selling it, thus moving millions below exchange control radars. They allegedly moved 4,400 Bitcoins, then valued at R500 million, hence SARS wanted them)
Standard Bank freezes LLC’s assets and files for liquidation to recover its R40 million, or what’s left of it. But FINSURV has other plans. They want to forfeit LLC’s assets at Standard Bank, including the R16 million held as collateral. A fight breaks out between FINSERV and Standard Bank. Meanwhile, the 4,400 Bitcoin are now worth R8 billion, moving in the vast deserts of cryptoland.
Four years later, on the 15th of May 2025, Judge Motha at the Pretoria High Court rules that cryptocurrencies are not subject to exchange controls in South Africa — they are not currency in terms of the law. In other words, Finsurv cannot chase LLC for the Bitcoin. It’s a heist; a clean heist. The judge also rules that the South African Reserve Bank cannot forfeit LLC’s assets held by Standard Bank (resulting from the liquidation, including the R16 million collateral). It’s a stalemate.
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Back to Al Green. In his moving appeal for Trump’s impeachment, he preaches that his great-grandfathers built the American economy in the cotton fields, on the railroads, in the ports, and even fought in the army. And then hits me: Yes. That’s where capital comes from—labour. But the Rustenberg Heist tells us something else: While labour, or what economists call productivity, justifies capital, more labour does not necessarily imply more capital. Working harder does not make you wealthier. For instance, the people who make bridges and sewage systems, the people who build roads and ensure that our street lights and taps are working, the people who collect our garbage are some of the hardest-working yet lowest-paid.
Some might think the opposite is true; that it’s not about hard labour, it’s about intellectual labour. This is also incorrect. As posited by Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz, if that were true, then the likes of Albert Einstein or Isaac Newton would have been among the richest men in history. However, the biggest commercial beneficiaries of their contributions were business people who took advantage of market forces and regulations.
So, capital grows where desire goes. A banana is a banana; a bitcoin is a bitcoin. However, its value depends on its desirability. That fickle and ethereal word — desire — is the value of capital. The lesson from the Rustenberg heist, the story about Justin and Brad, and dumb money is that capital is accumulated, not where desire is, but where it will be tomorrow. The point is to make moves just before dawn.
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