The Green Grid: A Filmmaker’s Journey to Malawi

Is Bitcoin a dirty coin? Filmmaker Alana Mediavilla put that question to the room at Mining Disrupt Miami 2023, and it is also the title of her documentary. She told the audience she had spent a year and a half producing and directing Dirty Coin, a film about the Bitcoin mining industry and the energy it uses.

Mediavilla has been a filmmaker for 13 years. She started a production company in Silicon Valley and made films for cloud companies until Google Cloud hired her. That work, she said, made her curious about how data centers were turning the internet into something physical. She left because she was tired of ending every film with a call to action.

The documentary grew out of the headlines. Tesla stopped accepting Bitcoin over the environment. China banned it for the same reason. A hundred thousand Cubans were using it to get around sanctions. Rather than pick a side, she said, she decided not to trust but to verify.

The production took her to Finland, Malawi, Washington and Paraguay. In Finland, miners were reusing their heat. In Malawi, the company Gridless is the anchor tenant for a micro-grid, and her crew filmed a house getting electricity for the first time.

Her argument on stage was that the energy debate is about the story, not the data. She said 52 percent of the electricity mining uses comes from renewable sources, and that studies from the University of Cambridge leave out flare gas and off-grid mining. In her words, "this is not a facts issue this is a narrative one."

The line she came back to was the one she said she had seen with her own eyes: "Bitcoin mining is helping fund countries out of energy poverty." Where a grid exists, she argued, mining helps with its problems. Where there is none, it helps pay to build one, so people get both an asset they can hold and the power lines they need.

She also went back to the beginning. Bitcoin, she said, was meant to work like cash, where only the two people in a trade know about it. A card payment, by contrast, is seen by banks, payment networks and anyone reading the statement.

When she spoke in July 2023, Bitcoin traded at $29,125. Today it trades at $81,514. She said the film would be finished by November and screened at conferences, and she asked the room to follow the project. The renewable figure was her own claim; she did not cite a source in the talk.

The full story is on Mining Disrupt at miningdisrupt dot com, and many more like it play around the clock on Bitcoin Radio.