For the past year I have been working on a research project that started with a deceptively simple question. When is someone actually compensated?
Most compensation systems evaluate success when payroll is delivered. But employees do not experience the value of their work on payday. They experience it years later, when they buy a home, retire, or discover whether decades of work translated into lasting financial security.
That question led me into compensation theory, pensions, actuarial science, labour economics, behavioural finance and monetary economics. Along the way I realised something surprising. Each discipline studies part of the journey, but almost nobody studies the journey itself.
The result is a framework I have called Temporal Compensation Theory. At its core is a simple idea.
Compensation is the transfer of purchasing power through time.
Why the lens matters
Once you look at compensation through that lens, the conversation changes. Compensation is no longer only about what employees are paid today. It is also about how effectively the value of their labour is carried into the future.
That reframing has teeth. It means a raise and a store of value are not separate topics. It means a benefits programme that moves money efficiently into an asset that decays is solving the wrong half of the problem. It means the honest measure of a compensation system is not the number on the payslip, but what that number still buys in twenty years.
This is not about Bitcoin.
It is about expanding the way we think about compensation in an era of mobile careers, declining pensions, and increasing responsibility placed on individuals to build their own long-term financial security. Bitcoin enters the conversation only as one possible implementation, not as the theory itself.
What I am asking for
This is a first public draft. Whether you are a compensation professional, an HR leader, an economist, an actuary, or a Bitcoiner interested in the future of work, I would like your feedback, and I would particularly like the objections.
Two papers are on SSRN. A longer, less formal treatment of the same ideas is being written as a book, and the essays that feed it are published as they are drafted.