The vault tripled. The 1% fee tripled. The labor, records show, held steady at none.
The trustee of the M. family Bitcoin trust earned three times his usual fee last quarter — a raise he attributes entirely to the price of Bitcoin and not at all to anything he did, which was nothing.
The fee, set at 1% of the trust's assets per year — a standard arrangement for trustees managing stocks and bonds — tripled in lockstep with a tripling vault, despite the underlying work consisting of, by the trustee's own accounting, "checking that the number was still there."
"I looked at it in January. I looked at it again in March. It had gone up, and so, somehow, had my compensation," the trustee said, declining to explain the connection because there isn't one.
Observers note that tying a fee to the price of an asset that mostly rises means paying more and more for work that does not change — an arrangement that benefits exactly one party.
The Bitcoin did all the appreciating. The fee took all the credit.
The family is now exploring paying for the work that is actually done, a concept the trustee described as "novel" and "concerning."
Everything above is satire. Here is how it actually goes when you fix it.
Why a percentage fee is a bad fit for Bitcoin
Corporate trustees commonly charge 0.5%–1.5% of assets per year. That can make sense for portfolios that need active management — but a vault that triples in value didn't require triple the work, so a percentage fee just means paying more for the same effort. The better fit is a per-task schedule: a set fee for setup, a set fee for the annual review, a set fee for the inheritance event, with hourly billing for anything unusual. Compensation tracks effort, not the price chart. The structure lives in two documents — the trust's compensation clause and the attorney's engagement letter.
How bitcoin-assistance helps
The assistant doesn't set fees or write engagement letters — that's the attorney. What it does is make the recurring work small and well-defined: bitcoin-assistance helps run the periodic vault review and health check — is everything reachable, are the cosigners current, is the recovery path intact — so the trustee's actual job becomes a discrete, nameable task that's easy to price per-task instead of as a vague percentage.
A percentage fee charges for the price going up. A per-task fee charges for the work being done. Only one of those is fair to a vault.
Background, not legal or financial advice. Fee structures belong in the trust instrument and the attorney's engagement letter. See The Paper Side.