How We Think
The Euclidean Method
All Roads Bitcoin makes one promise, evidence over hype and no price calls. Keeping it comes down to a seven-step test, and every claim on the site, for Bitcoin or against it, goes through it before we publish a word.
Most arguments about Bitcoin are not really about Bitcoin. They turn on one loaded word that never got defined, and it is a different word each time, whether the energy is “too much,” whether the price is a “bubble,” whether the thing has “intrinsic value.” Pin that word down and the myth usually resolves itself. So we start there, every time, and we show our work.
The seven-step test
Demonstrate, don’t assert. Every step rests on the one before it.
The method takes after the way Euclid did geometry, where nothing was asked on faith. He defined his terms and his assumptions before using them, then let each result rest only on what he had already proven, so a reader could follow the argument the whole way down and check it. We treat a claim about money the same way, and the six icons mark each move in the argument, with navy for the questions and orange for the answers.
- Define the problem. State the real question in one sentence. ○
- Define the terms. Pin down every word that carries weight before arguing about it. □
- Separate facts from assumptions. Sort each claim into fact, assumption, opinion, or prediction. △
- Identify first principles. Strip the question back to what must be true. □
- Build one logical step at a time. Each link rests on the last. Never jump. →
- Challenge the conclusion. Name what would prove it wrong, and where it is weakest. △
- Explain it simply. If it cannot be said plainly, the chain is not finished. ✓
The Euclidean method on three real myths
Watch where each argument actually turns. It is rarely where the shouting is.
These are three of the most common objections to Bitcoin, and each one breaks at a different step, which is the whole point of having a method instead of a favorite rebuttal. A single trick that works on the energy myth would be useless on the bubble. The test has to find the real fault wherever it sits.
“Bitcoin uses too much energy. It’s an environmental disaster.”
- □Define the terms. “Too much” compared to what? A yardstick has to measure Bitcoin against the systems doing the same job, storing and moving value, not against zero.
- ⬡Evidence. Bitcoin uses about 138 TWh a year, below banking at about 263 and gold mining at about 240. Roughly 52% already runs on sustainable power. Cambridge DMIR 2025; Galaxy Digital; World Gold Council.
- →Logic. The energy is not a running cost to be trimmed. It is the security. Strip out the work and the ledger becomes cheap to forge. Miners are also a sheddable load, paid to power down at peak demand. ERCOT paid one miner $31.7M to curtail, Aug 2023, CNBC.
Bitcoin uses less than the systems it replaces, and the energy is the security mechanism, not waste.
“Less than banking” only holds if you grant the comparison is fair, and a skeptic can answer that Bitcoin is optional where banking is not. The stronger answer is the energy-as-security point, not the raw number alone.
“Bitcoin is a speculative bubble, the next tulip mania.”
- □Define the terms. A bubble is not just a crash, since every asset crashes. It is permanent collapse, capital that never returns, the way tulips, the Mississippi Company, and most of the dot-com Nasdaq went to zero and stayed there.
- △Separate fact from claim. “It crashed” is true and tells you nothing. The test is whether it returns. Bitcoin has fallen 77% to 93% four times since 2011, and made a new all-time high after each one within 13 to 38 months. Exchange data, approximate.
- ⬡Evidence. Something real sits under the price. A fixed 21 million supply, a network that grew through every crash, and need-driven demand where currencies fail. Argentina inflation 211% in 2023, INDEC.
Bitcoin fails the definition of a bubble. Bubbles leave wreckage. Networks leave infrastructure.
“It recovers, therefore not a bubble” answers the crash-and-recovery definition. It does not answer the deeper claim that Bitcoin has no fundamental value. We say so plainly, because pretending otherwise looks like a dodge. That separate question is the next myth.
“Bitcoin has no intrinsic value. It produces nothing and is worth only what the next person will pay.”
- □Define the terms. In finance, “intrinsic value” means the present value of an asset’s future cash flows. It is a test built for productive assets, like a business or a rental.
- →Logic. Money produces no cash flows. Apply that test consistently and it disqualifies gold and the dollar exactly as much as Bitcoin. When a definition rules out the very things the critic holds, the definition is the broken part, not Bitcoin.
- ⬡Evidence. Bitcoin offers three things that do not depend on price. Security paid for in energy, a 21 million cap every node enforces, and transfer no custodian can freeze. Regulators already price that substance. SEC spot ETFs 2024; EU MiCA 2023; highest adoption in unstable-currency countries, Chainalysis 2022.
It is not that Bitcoin fails the test. The test was never designed for money.
The strongest objection, from Peter Schiff, is that gold has an industrial floor and Bitcoin does not. True. We concede it. Then we note the floor is not decisive. In 1933, Executive Order 6102 forced US gold holders to surrender at $20.67, then revalued it to $35, about 59 cents on the dollar. The floor did not protect them. National Archives.
Don’t take our word for it. We’d rather show the work than ask you to trust it.
All Roads Lead to BitcoinLook back and all three turned on a single word, the one holding the whole claim up: “too much,” a “bubble,” “intrinsic value.” Get that word right and the argument mostly settles itself. It is also why we hand every critic their best argument and mark our own weakest link in plain sight. A conclusion that cannot take a punch is not worth publishing.
Run any claim through it yourself
Every myth on this site is worked the same way. Pick the objection you have heard most and see where it actually breaks.
Read the Bitcoin Myths series