Who is writing this, and what they have at stake

I am Scott Dedels. I spent my working life inside the compensation profession, and I now run Block Rewards, a Canadian company that builds an employer-sponsored savings benefit.

This site is where the research lives. It is published under my own name rather than the company's, because the argument has to be able to survive without the company and the company should not be able to borrow authority the argument has not earned.

Why this exists

The question in the title started as an irritation rather than a research programme. I kept noticing that the profession I worked in had an extraordinary apparatus for deciding how much to pay someone, and almost nothing to say about what happened to that value afterwards. Not because anyone had decided it did not matter. Because the institution that used to handle it, the defined benefit pension, had been receding for thirty years and nothing had inherited the job.

Every time I raised it, the conversation went one of two ways. Either it became a financial literacy conversation, which puts the problem back on the employee, or it became an investment conversation, which puts it on a fund manager. Neither of those is a compensation conversation, and I could not work out why compensation had stopped being allowed to have one.

Three papers later, I think the reason is structural rather than intellectual, and it has a name. That is most of what this work is about.

The disclosure

Three things follow from that, and they are the terms I have tried to hold myself to.

The first two papers name no asset at all. Not one. If the framework only works when you already know where it is going, it is not a framework, and the way to prove it is to build the whole evaluation apparatus before naming a single candidate. The Six Tests were written before any asset was tested against them.

The third paper defends the incumbent arrangement at full strength before it criticises anything, including inflation-linked government bonds, which are the best-verified preservation instrument that exists. Most of its length is spent making the strongest available case for the thing I might be assumed to be arguing against.

And where the analysis is unflattering to my own interest, it says so. The finding on Bitcoin is that it reassigns risk rather than reducing it, that it fails the Arrival test for floor liabilities, that it fails the Human test under self-custody, and that it cannot pool. It is not a pension. I do not think a person building a Bitcoin benefit is supposed to write that sentence, which is roughly why I trust the sentence.

The standard I want to be held to is simple. A reader should be able to disagree with me about Bitcoin entirely and still find the compensation argument useful. If that is not true of something I have written, I would like to know.

Corrections

These are working papers. Several drafts have already changed because somebody sent an objection that held. If you have a citation that would move a claim, an argument that breaks one, or a number that does not reconcile, that is the most useful thing you can send me and it will get a real answer.

Get in touch

Email is best: scott@blockrewards.com. I am also on LinkedIn.

For speaking, the material adapts to anything between five minutes and a half day, and it does not require an audience with any interest in Bitcoin. Most of the rooms I have presented this in have had none.

How to cite this work

Once the papers are posted to SSRN, please cite the SSRN version, which carries a stable identifier and a version history.

About the company

Block Rewards is a Canadian company offering an employer-sponsored Bitcoin savings benefit. It is the reason I encountered this problem and it is not the subject of this site. Nothing here is investment advice, and nothing here should be read as a recommendation to hold any particular asset.