Bitcoin Miners Send Message at Fidelity: We Run on Clean Energy, Not Dirty Coal

Bitcoin miners made the case for their industry as a driver of clean energy adoption, rather than the ecological disaster depicted by critics, at Fidelity's Mining Summit Friday.

The Fidelity Center for Applied Technology, an R&D division that has dabbled in bitcoin mining, hosted the conference at the financial services giant's global headquarters in Boston.

Aside from welcoming the 300 or so attendees and a brief overview of mining history by Jurica Bulovic, innovation manager at Fidelity Labs, Fidelity mostly ceded the stage to guest speakers.

In their presentations, these miners and others sought to disprove the popular perception that the copious amount of electricity devoted to securing the bitcoin network - 0.26% of world consumption, according to Digiconomist - is an environmental threat.

Miners are located mostly in mountainous regions with big rivers and a high share of renewable power in the overall energy mix, CoinShares found: 48 percent of all global mining happens in the Chinese province of Sichuan where renewable energy is prevalent, and 12 percent takes in other parts of China that together get around half of their energy from renewables.

Asked how the data about miners' concentration was gathered, Bendiksen acknowledged that it mostly comes from miners themselves.

"We just trawled the entire internet, including forums of miners, we talked to miners themselves, read news articles," he told CoinDesk.

Barbour said his company developed a system that captures gas at an oil drilling site, transforms it into energy and then uses it for bitcoin mining.

Associated gas is a liability for them, so helping them get rid of it by mining is actually a service, for which oil companies might let miners on their territory for free, he said.

Image of the Fidelity Mining Summit courtesy of Fidelity.