BTCTCs exist for one reason and one reason only: to significantly outperform Bitcoin. If they fail at their raison d’etre, they serve no purpose for shareholders.

In our opinion, BTCTCs are amplified Bitcoin proxies—but only for insiders. In the overwhelming majority of potential outcomes, the payoff for insiders is asymmetrically positive, while the payoff for shareholders—at least relative to Bitcoin—is asymmetrically negative.

Compensation structures are inadvertent confessionals of the corporate soul. They reveal not only management’s motivations but strip away the gilded rhetoric to expose how management truly views shareholders—as owners or marks.

Other than a nominal salary, is your compensation structure tied exclusively to the out-performance of your common share price versus Bitcoin—subject to a cumulative high water mark—and are you handcuffed alongside shareholders for a long period of time (say, a minimum of five years) with no way to sell, hedge, or cash out in the interim?

The fact that few—if any—of the management teams and boards whose filings we reviewed have chosen to hold themselves to the gold standard of BTCTC governance perhaps reveals something telling about their “corporate soul”: their true beliefs, priorities, and “revealed preferences.” For all their sanctimonious invocations of the Bitcoin Standard ethos, they appear to be at least as “fiat-brained” and “high time preference” as anyone else in our Golden Age of Grift.

Never forget that as a BTCTC shareholder you only win when your shares appreciate faster than Bitcoin itself. If insiders have ever received or will ever receive compensation tied to any outcome other than this—or if they’re compensated over a shorter time horizon than the holding period they recommend to you—then they are fundamentally playing a different game than you are.