"The venture model isn't broken, but the assumptions behind its returns are clearly changing." Eric Yakes, Founder at Epoch Ventures, speaking at The Bitcoin Conference 2026, pointed to a milestone that forces a reset: 2023 delivered the first negative global VC returns in roughly two decades. For an industry built on power-law outcomes, where a small number of outliers drive the majority of returns, this isn't just a bad year. It's a signal that capital flows, exit environments, and return distributions are shifting in ways that challenge the traditional playbook. What he's describing is less about failure and more about transition. Venture capital may still work, but likely not in the same way, and not with the same expectations. The structural takeaway: ✅ Power-law dynamics becoming less reliable ✅ Capital allocation models are adjusting ✅ Return expectations are compressing ✅ Portfolio construction may need to evolve If returns are no longer driven by the same outliers, then the entire venture strategy, from deployment to exit, needs to be reconsidered. Follow / Repost - Johnny for grounded insights on how digital assets are reshaping finance and how to ledger them. #thejohnnycrypto #bitcoin #Stablecoins #staking #BTC

A delivery van starts losing value the day it leaves the lot. The owner knows that, so he keeps it moving. A van sitting still is a bill with wheels. Bitcoin's security is produced by a business shaped like that van. Here is the setup. New bitcoin is created by miners. Miners are people running specialized computers that race to solve a math puzzle, and whoever wins gets to add the next page to the ledger and collect the new coins plus the fees paid by users. That race is what makes the ledger expensive to rewrite. Security here is a thing somebody produces at a cost. And the cost is physical. The machines wear out and lose value every month, the same way the van does. The power bill arrives in dollars or pesos or rand, and the utility will not take bitcoin for it. Hosting, cooling and rent are all owed in local money on a local schedule. So a miner carries a problem a holder never has. He earns in bitcoin and he owes in currency. To keep the lights on he sells some of what he produced, month after month, whether he feels like it or not. That forced selling is my claim. It is the channel that keeps pushing new supply out of the mine and into the hands of people who had none of it. A system where security gets paid for with the coin itself, by whoever already holds the most of it, has no equivalent channel. The reward goes back to the largest holders and stays there. Now the strongest argument against me. Industrial operators with ten year power contracts and direct access to chip factories hold advantages a person with a box in the garage will never match. On that reading, small miners are a rounding error subsidizing a professional industry, and anyone can join is closer to a story than a fact. Here is what would show me wrong. Small and home production keeps shrinking as a share of total output across several cycles, while the economics stay comfortable only at industrial scale. I keep coming back to one line. Bitcoin's ledger is defended by machines that lose value, bought with money nobody on the network gets to print. if you learned one thing here Zap ⚡