The Receipt

In June of 2025 I bought Sequans. By October I had written a sentence I still don't enjoy reading. "I jumped on SQNS in June and it's easily the worst investing decision I have made to date. I am down a huge amount from the initial investment."

That is where I need to start, because that is where I was sitting. Before there was a framework or a website or anyone calling me the CEBE guy, there was a regular person who believed in something and lost real money on it. I didn't catch Strategy early and ride it to multiples. I caught it when the sentiment was high and before the October crypto liquidation. I'm in the same hole a lot of you are sitting in.

I had dabbled with Bitcoin since 2017. That was my first purchase and I have never sold, though I didn't DCA the way I should have. The correction from 19K scared me off adding, and I am a husband and father who still had colleges and retirement to fund. I didn't have burn money for Bitcoin. Then the pandemic put our family into survival mode, and speculative investments became nice-to-haves I feared I would regret in the rearview. We hunkered down, saved, and rode it out like everyone else.

Riding it out meant a lot of time at home, so I started paying attention to money, and concepts that had seemed out of reach started to make sense. What that gave me was an awareness of how money works and how I was being worked by it. I dabbled in stocks, and honestly, I didn't like it. Not because I didn't make money, I did. I just felt like I was guessing, putting my money behind what someone else told me to believe, in an area where I knew I lacked expertise. And some of what I was supposed to buy, I just really didn't want to own.

I kept looking for something else to put money behind. That search ran me through the Bitcoin influencers, the ones running companies and the ones promoting forks alike. Somewhere in that education I stopped being a guy who owned some Bitcoin and became a Bitcoiner. I saw what a digital transformation of the global economy was actually worth. And that is what led me to Bitcoin Treasury Companies, because they offered something I thought was rare and clean, a way for an ordinary person to get amplified Bitcoin exposure built on math and probability rather than on guessing which executive or product would win. That belief is the whole reason I was in the foxhole.

And I didn't believe quietly. I'd spent 2025 as a student of this thing, watching the videos and the spaces, learning from people who had been right about Bitcoin years before I showed up. I was sure enough that I went to my own family and told them to look at this, and I reached out to people I hadn't spoken to in years to do the same. I put my name on it to the people closest to me.

I leaned in everywhere. In the X community, "Irresponsibly long MTPLF," I posted in September. "Trying to go longer and get other people on this train!" and I meant every word. I cared about the Bitcoin behind the share, not the fiat price in front of it. "Do you want less Bitcoin per share and more fiat MSTR share value today?" I asked someone that fall. "That's not for me."

Here is the part I have to own before I get to the part I'm proud of. In mid-January of 2026 a thread kicked off about whether Bitcoin per share actually means anything to a common shareholder, and I did not just disagree. I went to war for it. I told the people questioning the metric that their argument was beneath their analytical abilities. I called them dilution crybabies and told them to sell their shares and move on. I wrote, and I'll quote myself so I can't soften it later, that their position looked like "weak work" and "blind hate or something."

I was the most confident person in that thread. I was also wrong about the one thing that would have changed how I was investing, and the people I was talking down to had their finger right on it.

What makes it harder to write is that I was already halfway to the answer. For weeks I'd been posting about the very machinery CEBE would later measure, from the flattering side of it. I argued that issuing shares above net asset value adds to the Bitcoin behind each one, and that over time the leverage worked for the common, not against it. I had the engine right. I even told the skeptics not to stop at the denominator, to keep going. I just never took my own advice the rest of the way, to the claims sitting on top of the common, because I didn't realize they weren't being counted.

That was the half I was missing, and a guy named Jesse was the one who put it in front of me. He didn't match my heat. He made a quiet, technical point and left it there. Bitcoin per share ignores what sits on top of common equity, the preferred and the other claims that get paid before you do, and even the "diluted" share counts everyone leans on don't include the nonconvertible preferreds. I had ripped the people scrutinizing the share count without ever pointing that scrutiny at the other side of the fraction myself.

In plain language, when a company raises money by issuing debt or preferred stock to buy more Bitcoin, those new claims sit ahead of the common shareholder in line. The Bitcoin per share number goes up while your real ownership doesn't. The new claim ate it.

If you listen to the bears and naysayers they will ascribe ill intent to the "suitcoiners" and try to name you a villain, and I don't think there is one. When this started there was essentially one company doing it, Strategy, buying Bitcoin with convertible debt in a structure that BPS described well enough. Then what it was describing changed. Preferred stacks showed up, then PIPEs and layered structures nobody had needed a year before, and the metric never caught up. It kept getting used out of momentum after it had stopped describing the balance sheet it was supposed to measure. By middle of 2025 other treasuries were coming online looking very different but copying the same metrics. The metrics just weren't describing those balance sheets, because BPS stopped at convertible debt.

That gap is where I lost money and where a lot of regular people lost money.

I'll sit with the uncomfortable part. I am an Enterprise IT and Cybersecurity guy with no finance background. The most important realization about my understanding came from a stranger on an X post who wouldn't take my bait. He calmly pointed me to Strategy's definitions, whose own words told me what I didn't want to believe. That preferred and non-convertible debt weren't in the fraction. That the engine I was counting on to outperform Bitcoin, its cost wasn't even being counted.

I couldn't believe it, but there it was in front of me. I was trusting I was ahead of the whole world with metrics that were purpose-built to measure Bitcoin treasuries. I wouldn't have thought the preferred equity that was going to usher trillions to the BTC network would be invisible to the metrics. I also didn't think to check the definitions because I never thought I would be an analyst of balance sheets and need to question that. I trust EBITDA, P/E, and the rest. This, in my mind, was like that. Who was I to question it, and back then my thought was I probably didn't understand it well enough anyway.

Evidently none of us did.

A sector whose entire promise is fixing an opaque, extractive financial system is running on a number that hides leverage and dilution from the exact people it claims to serve. I felt that as disappointment, but it was the disappointment you feel toward something you love. We expected better, and I include myself in the we.

The thing about a good challenge is that it doesn't leave when the argument ends. Jesse's point sat with me. I kept circling one question that the metric I'd defended so loudly couldn't answer. Well, what do I actually own then?

The next few days were filled with anxiety. I first told myself, it's ok, the market is cyclical and this is all based on BTC, and so if BTC recovers, so will my stock positions. That was cope and I knew it, so I couldn't sit still. I crashed out with Claude and a calculator and tried to understand where I went wrong. Bitcoin isn't going to fail and these companies weren't going to fail, but there is a measuring problem that needs fixed.

I built something that could answer it. Common Equity Bitcoin Exposure, CEBE, is almost embarrassingly simple. You take all the Bitcoin, subtract the claims that sit ahead of you, the debt and the preferred net of cash, and divide what's left by the shares. It is the Bitcoin that is actually yours, per share, after everyone senior to you has been counted. BPS is what the company claims. CEBE is the receipt.

The first thing I did with it was run my own largest position. Strategy, MSTR, the company I'd been defending in that thread the same week. I ran it across all of 2025 and watched the BPS gains from each weekly announcement come apart in front of me. The premium I thought I was holding was 127 percent in the first quarter, then 117, then 59, and by New Year's Eve just under 6. The market had been paying me more than double the Bitcoin behind my shares. By year-end it was paying the Bitcoin and almost nothing else, with a preferred stack ahead of me that had crossed into the billions with a b and was growing weekly. The cushion wasn't gone. The markup was, and I'd been mistaking one for the other.

The number alone doesn't carry what that did to me. What I felt was horror, and then a kind of panic I haven't felt over money before. I had put real money into this, including money a person isn't supposed to gamble. And I hadn't kept it to myself. I'd sent my own family toward this, and people I'd pulled back into my life after years away, and now the tool I built was telling me the floor under all of it had dropped out. For a few hours I was sure I'd bet the farm on snake oil and taken the people who trusted me down with me. My first rough runs that night said I might already be underwater. They were wrong, and the corrected figure is at the bottom of this piece, because that is the entire point.

You see in the months before that, I had been building this up to the people closest to me, my wife and my kids. I couldn't be as open with everyone, but I could tell them. I would use cheeky comments like we are pre-rich. They would catch me just smiling around the house, and it was because I thought I had understood something before everyone else. That we were early, and that it was going to change our lives. Then I read the definitions, and my gross position showed me how gross it was. I felt defeated.

I kept going because now I had a choice. Panic sell and get out, or confirm I was right, but I just didn't know how to see it clearly. I believed in the engine. I could describe it, but I couldn't prove it. The metrics I thought I had were exposed, but the engine was still there. I needed to find it.

The day before that thread I had posted that the gap between Bitcoin's growth and the deflating fiat liability creates a growing spread with every share issued. I just hadn't measured what it meant for my own ownership, share by share, after the senior claims. CEBE let me. Keeping every unit in Bitcoin instead of dollars is what made it visible, and once it was visible it told me two things at once that the old metric could never show you. The people I had been talking down to were right that the claims had consumed what I thought I owned. The premium collapsed from 127 to 6. And I was right that the engine was real. Across 2025 the sats behind my shares grew 6.76 percent, measured in Bitcoin, not dollars, while the market's premium collapsed around them. The claims didn't eat the Bitcoin. They ate the premium. The market's diluted BPS grew 11.07 percent that same year. What I actually owned grew 6.76. The gap is what the claims took. I later measured that overstatement properly, sixty-six weeks of filed data, and the gap between the market's diluted BPS and CEBE widened on preferred events alone.

There it was. I didn't fuck up, I just came in early. The claims were fixed in dollars, and Bitcoin wasn't. Every leg higher meant fewer sats were needed to cover them, and the rest flowed back to the common. The preferreds were holding my sats. But they were mine.

The relief I felt when that realization set in was mine alone. I hadn't shared my panic with the family, so I couldn't share this news. It's one of those lonely moments you wish you could have shared, but sharing it meant I would have had to share the doubt and the anxiety that spurred this effort. I think I made the right choice. When they read this, it will be the first time they hear I ever had doubt about the position I have put us in. It is also the last time I had any.

This time I didn't take it back to my family. They had put belief in me, borrowing my conviction until they were ready to build their own. I took it to the timeline instead, and almost nobody saw what I was seeing. I had what felt like a real discovery and it landed on no one. Then a couple of the people I'd been learning from started to look back. Peter Duan, who I'd watched on the Metaplanet Dojo in 2025, reached out first and encouraged me to keep going, to stay patient, that this was needed. We did an X live interview on a Saturday morning to walk through how it improves on BPS, and at the end of it he asked if he could help me get in anywhere. He still checks in. When Strive posted a job that fit my professional background, he sent me the listing and asked if I'd seen it. That's what this space is supposed to produce.

Adam Livingston had been making the videos I'd watched for the better part of a year. He'd just put out one built on BPS torque, a bull case for how fast Bitcoin per share can grow, and I got in the comments. I didn't tell him he was wrong. I told him he was underselling it. Torque captures one engine and misses the second, the way the dollar claims shrink against Bitcoin as it climbs, so what common equity actually owns grows faster than the marketing number can show. He understood it inside a day, called the two ideas symbiotic, and that same week he made a video calling CEBE bull fuel. "Bitcoin per share is your billboard," he said. "CEBE is your bank account." The most bullish voice I knew had taken the framework, put it to its tests, and come out where I had. I put my head down and kept going.

In late January I went back to that thread and thanked Jesse, because I wasn't going to pretend I'd gotten there alone. "Your pushback on BPS forced me to think deeper about what common equity actually owns," I told him. "That discomfort led to the CEBE framework." He has since deleted his posts. The exchange that pushed me to finally build the thing is gone from the timeline now, but the credit stands, which is why it's here too. He didn't hand me the idea. He showed me the definitions that would require it.

I built CEBE for myself first, and once I'd watched it talk me off a ledge I could not unsee how much it would have saved me back in June. Other people are in my position right now, making financial decisions on metrics built for marketing, not measurement. So I built the tool I needed but didn't have when I arrived in this sector, put it at cebetracker.io, and gave it away. If we are right I won't need the money a paywall would provide, and if I am wrong I shouldn't be selling this. There are enough grifters in this space. We need more gifters.

I'm still a bull, I still believe an ordinary person can get amplified Bitcoin exposure built on math rather than luck, and being a bull is the entire reason I want the number to be honest. The math that shows the floor in a drawdown is the same math that shows the upside is bigger than the billboard. If you love this sector, you should want the number honest too.

The lesson this taught me is the ethos Bitcoin was built on. Don't trust, verify. Auditing systems instead of trusting them is not a new concept for an IT engineer, I just never thought to point it at the metrics. Now when we get together as a family, I still talk about how Bitcoin is the apex asset on earth. I excitedly talk about how our shares in a company that used to run failing hotels in Japan will help us get to see the country one day. The difference between before and after CEBE is that before, I hoped the people handing me the metrics knew what they were measuring. Now I don't have to hope. I can check.

I lost money learning this. You don't have to. That is the entire reason this exists.