Alana Mediavilla opened her talk at Mining Disrupt Miami 2023 with the question that names her film: is Bitcoin a dirty coin? She said she had asked it as a bitcoiner for four years, and far more intensely over the year and a half she had spent producing and directing the documentary Dirty Coin, a film about the Bitcoin mining industry. The session was recorded at the conference, held July 25–27, 2023, while the film was still in production.
From Google Cloud to a mining documentary
Mediavilla told the room she had been a filmmaker for 13 years and had started a production company in Silicon Valley, making films for cloud companies until Google Cloud hired her. That work, she said, got her interested in how high-performance computing and data centers were turning the internet into something physical. She left because she no longer wanted every film to end on a call to action.
She described volunteer work in Puerto Rico, where she talks about Bitcoin without sponsors and without wallets or products to sell. Her aim there, she said, was to make sure people did not treat Bitcoin as the same thing as Dogecoin, Ethereum and everything else. She admitted that price was what first drew her in. What kept her, she said, was the idea of money without borders and money separated from the state.
The film came out of the headlines. She listed them: Tesla no longer accepting Bitcoin because of the environment, China banning it for the same reason, a hundred thousand Cubans using it to get around sanctions, and others saying it would save the world. Faced with that, she said, she decided not to trust but to verify, and to make a documentary for a mainstream audience about where the industry's energy money goes and how it reaches the communities around mines, large and small.
Cash, privacy and the white paper
Before the energy question, she went back to the white paper's description of Bitcoin as a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. With paper cash, she said, only the two people in a transaction know about it, and neither needs to know anything about the other. A debit card payment is different: the bank, the merchant's bank, the vendor, the payment rails, a spouse reading the statement and intelligence agencies can all see it.
That, she said, was the cypherpunks' worry: how to choose what to reveal as more of life moves online. Satoshi Nakamoto published the white paper to that community, and in 2008, in her telling, combined existing technologies into a system that worked. She stressed that it works in person as well as online, and that keeping a purchase private has value even when the two people are standing face to face.
She raised Silk Road as one of the first cases of Bitcoin working as private money online, and argued that what people buy with cash says nothing about the cash itself. The same, she said, applies to Bitcoin.
Finland, Malawi, DC and Paraguay
The production took her to Finland, Malawi, Washington, DC and Paraguay, which she described as four continents. In Finland she saw miners repurposing their heat. In Malawi, Gridless is the anchor tenant for a micro-grid, and she said people there were getting electricity for the first time. Her crew filmed a house receiving power for the first time, which she credited to Gridless moving in.
She also interviewed policymakers, naming U.S. Senator Cynthia Lummis, and said those conversations kept to energy. The film, she said, is specifically about the energy side of mining.
A narrative problem, not a facts problem
Her main argument was about the numbers the public hears. She said 52 percent of the electricity mining consumes comes from renewable sources, which she called one of the highest shares of any industry. She said University of Cambridge estimates leave out flare gas and off-grid mining, that some of its studies are old, and that people rarely hear that other industries use more electricity than whole countries. Bitcoin, in her view, is being unfairly targeted.
this is not a facts issue this is a narrative one
Alana Mediavilla · 8:34
She added that the Lightning Network lowers the energy used per Bitcoin transaction.
Mining and energy poverty
The point she pressed hardest was what she had seen on location.
Bitcoin mining is helping fund countries out of energy poverty
Alana Mediavilla · 8:47
She said she had seen it herself rather than taking it on trust, and was speaking with the people doing the work. In countries lucky enough to have a grid, she argued, mining addresses real grid problems; in countries without one, it helps pay for new grids. As she put it, people get both access to an asset that lets them compete in the world and the electrical infrastructure they will need.
Bitcoin mining is a real solution for real problems that we have with our electrical grid
Alana Mediavilla · 9:13
She said the film would be finished by November and shown at conferences, and asked the audience to follow the project.
The teaser
Short on time, she skipped the teaser during the talk, then asked the room for two extra minutes and played it at the end. It sets the familiar charges against mining, among them that it uses more electricity than the Netherlands, that one transaction is like throwing away two iPhones and that Bitcoin is a pyramid scheme, beside interview clips arguing that mines attach to unused energy, can shut off when the grid needs capacity and can help the move to a decarbonized economy. Those lines come from the film's interviewees, not from Mediavilla, and the session audio does not name them.
Then and now
When Mediavilla spoke on July 25, 2023, Bitcoin traded at $29,125. On October 17, 2026, it traded at $81,514. The 52 percent renewable figure and the criticism of the Cambridge estimates are her own claims from the stage; she did not name a source for the figure in the talk.