Gouspillou has become most well known for helping to establish a Bitcoin mining facilities in Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC)<\/a>, where some of the operation\u2019s proceeds have gone back to both the park for its conservation efforts as well as to bettering the the lives of those in communities that surround the facilities.<\/p>\n Gouspillou has also seen how Bitcoin mining is furthering efforts to electrify rural Africa. After what he\u2019s seen on this front, he believes that we cannot live in a world without Bitcoin mining at this point because \u201cit\u2019s just too useful,\u201d as he puts it.<\/p>\n But Gouspillou hasn\u2019t always been a Bitcoin believer, nor a successful entrepreneur. Before finding Bitcoin, his professional life was more run-of-the-mill, as he held a number of salaried positions in a handful of fields that seemed notably less exciting than running Bitcoin mining operations in some of the most off-the-beaten-path regions of the world.<\/p>\n Before falling down the proverbial Bitcoin rabbit hole in 2015, Gouspillou had a number of different jobs ranging from working for a real estate developer to working for a forestry company in Asia to importing dry cleaning machines for companies as big as Euro Disney.<\/p>\n \u201cI’m not a scientist or an engineer,\u201d Gouspillou told Bitcoin Magazine. <\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m a businessman, and my training is in marketing and sales. It was hard for me to understand Bitcoin at first,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n He first heard about Bitcoin in 2010 when his childhood friend and now co-founder of BigBlock Datacenter, Jean-Fran\u00e7ois Augusti, began mining it.<\/p>\n Gouspillou dismissed his friend\u2019s efforts back then; he felt Augusti was wasting his time mining bitcoin.<\/p>\n Five years later, though, Bitcoin piqued Gouspillou\u2019s interest, and he spent most of 2015 researching it. Toward the latter part of that year, he approached Augusti with a new perspective on Bitcoin and proposed that they start mining together.<\/p>\n Shortly thereafter, the two set up amateur operations in a small industrial space they rented. And by June 2017, they had moved their operations to a former Alcatel<\/a> (a former French telecommunications equipment company) factory Orvault, a small town outside of Gouspillou’s home town of Nantes.<\/p>\n At this point, Gouspillou and Augusti had formally incorporated BigBlock Datacenter and began receiving funding from outside investors.<\/p>\n The facility in Orvault was their first operation, while the second one was in Odessa, Ukraine. What the two locations had in common was access to cheap power.<\/p>\n In Odessa, Gouspillou and Augusti had a container with 200\u00a0S9 ASIC\u00a0miners<\/a> that they maintained on their own.<\/p>\n \u201cThe operation was very small compared to what we have now, but, at that moment, it was very big to us because we were alone to do the work,\u201d recalled Gouspillou.<\/p>\n Aside from the technical challenges that came with learning how to operate a bitcoin mining farm, Gouspillou and his partner ran into other hurdles, as well.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was very difficult to work in Ukraine at that time, because people in Europe and in the banks used to say, \u2018Are you crazy? It’s a terrorist state \u2014 there\u2019s only mafia in this country,\u2019\u201d recalled Gouspillou.<\/p>\n As it turned out, the bad guys in the country didn\u2019t just include members of the mafia but corrupt government officials, as well.<\/p>\n \u201cWe had big issues with the government, particularly the Secret Service, the SBU<\/a>,\u201d said Gouspillou.<\/p>\n \u201cThey came one day to seize our farm, and we got shut down for three months. We negotiated and gave them eight bitcoin. That was the price to let us work,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n \u201cSoon after we reconnected the ASICs, though, it was too late. The price of electricity had doubled. So, we left to go to Kazakhstan by 2018.\u201d<\/p>\n Gouspillou and Augusti were two of the first foreigners to begin mining in Kazakhstan. They set up shop on the same lake as Valery Vavilov, founder and CEO of Bitfury<\/a>, and his team and mined there before falling victim to another shakedown.<\/p>\n \u201cWe lost a lot of machines in Kazakhstan,\u201d said Gouspillou.<\/p>\n \u201cThe mafia took the machines, and then they sequestered me overnight after a meeting and asked me to buy the machines back from them,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n \u201cBetween this and the price of bitcoin crashing in 2018, I lost 20 kilograms in one year.\u201d<\/p>\n Gouspillou and his partner left Kazakhstan soon after to set up a small operation in Siberia, Russia (which has become even smaller in recent years).<\/p>\n Gouspillou remembers well the toll that all of this took not only on him but on his family, as well.<\/p>\n \u201cMy wife said, \u2018Why don’t you change your work? Why don’t you return to a normal job? Your fucking bitcoin is destroying us,\u2019\u201d he recalled.<\/p>\n \u201cI was in my late 40s, not very young, and maybe it was not the right moment to be taking so many risks,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n \u201cBut I didn\u2019t want to stop. Jean-Fran\u00e7ois and I continued to be very confident about the price of Bitcoin rising again one day.\u201d<\/p>\n By 2019, rise again it did, alleviating some of Gouspillou\u2019s financial pain in the process.<\/p>\n \u201cThe price saved us because we had the capacity to pay back our investors for some ASICs we lost because of the mafia,\u201d said Gouspillou.<\/p>\n Gouspillou and Augusti were able to buy a new fleet of ASICs while the price of the machines was very low, which helped to make their operations very profitable moving forward, especially as the 2020 bitcoin bull run accelerated.<\/p>\n And the winds of fate really shifted when Gouspillou first met Prince Emmanuel de Merode of Belgium, a conservationist and anthropologist who works to protect Virunga and establish peace in the DRC<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cIn 2020, he asked me to create a mining farm in Virunga,\u201d said Gouspillou.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was the best moment of the life of the company, because we became profitable on our facilities around the globe and well-known when we took this opportunity in Virunga,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n \u201cBefore Virunga, we were mining. With Virunga, we implemented mining that was socially useful.\u201d (More on how mining in Virunga is “socially useful” later in the piece.)<\/p>\n This isn\u2019t to say that starting the farm in the Congo was easy, though.<\/p>\n Gouspillou described how there\u2019s been fighting in this region long before he and Augusti brought their first container of ASICs there, and the fighting has only intensified since.<\/p>\n \u201cI am supposed to go to Virunga next week, but I have to wait because there is a deep war in this region at the moment,\u201d explained Gouspillou.<\/p>\n Despite the conflict, Gouspillou, Augusti and the two other team members that founded the Virunga farm have had notable success in the region. They started with two containers filled with 700 ASIC S9s. These machines have been powered by hydroelectric energy from a plant on the Luviro River, close to Ivingu<\/a>, since that time.<\/p>\n Mining bitcoin with a low cost of electricity in the region quickly made the operation profitable, which not only made Gouspillou\u2019s investors happy but Prince de Merode, as well.<\/p>\n Prince de Merode had invited Gouspillou and his team to Virunga to aid his work in preserving the park. The arrangement looked like this: Initially, Gouspillou and his team brought in two containers \u2014 one owned by BigBlock Datacenter and one owned by the park. BigBlock Datacenter paid the electricity costs for their container but managed both. (Now, there are 10 containers in the park, seven owned by BigBlock Datacenter and 3 owned by the park.)<\/p>\n The profits from the bitcoin mined by the park went\/go to the park to help preserve it. The mining farm also began employing locals who would otherwise have to resort to burning trees in efforts to produce coal that they could sell.<\/p>\n The benefits of establishing this plant in the region are illustrated in a short documentary Gouspillou showed at Adopting Bitcoin El Salvador 2023 (1:29-7:05 in the following video):<\/p>\n<\/p>\n More recently, Gouspillou and his team realized that they could use the heat produced from the mining to dry fruits as well as cocoa beans, which are used to make chocolate<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n While the mining farm currently employs 15 people full time, the fruit and cocoa drying efforts have created another 50-60 part-time jobs for those living around the farm. Gouspillou sees the potential for these operations to scale up in the near future.<\/p>\n \u201cWith the fruits, we can imagine creating 100 to 300 jobs for people,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n But in the breath after Gouspillou discussed the potential in the region, he also touched on the hardships, some of which have both been heartbreaking and have made scaling difficult.<\/p>\n Since the onset of operations in the DRC, Gouspillou has lost a number of team members to both violence and acts of God.<\/p>\n One young man named Moise was killed and washed away in what Gouspillou described as \u201ca rush of water that came down from the mountains.\u201d<\/p>\n (Gouspillou and his team also had to repair the many ASICs that were damaged during this event, many of which were new S19<\/a>s.)<\/p>\n Then, in another tragic event just six weeks later, members of his team were ambushed, resulting in five deaths.<\/p>\n He described the situation mournfully:<\/p>\n \u201cWhen the team members leave the farm to go back home, one of their options is to take a plane from the park,\u201d he began.<\/p>\n \u201cBut sometimes they don’t have enough gas or kerosene, so we have to take a car 30 kilometers to get to a small airport in the jungle, and the road we have to take is dangerous,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n \u201cOne of our technicians, the wife of the cook at the farm and the three others in the car were killed by the Mai-Mai<\/a> (a rebel group in the region).\u201d<\/p>\n Gouspillou and his team took these deaths hard. The technician, a young man named Jones who was also a manager at the farm, had been with the team for four years.<\/p>\n \u201cHe started at the lowest level and in three years became the boss of the farm,\u201d said Gouspillou.<\/p>\n \u201cWe were very close to him. I knew him very well since the beginning; I hired him,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n What is more, Prince de Merode has lost upwards of 30 rangers from his team that protect the farm due to violence over the course of the four years the farm has been up and running (and 200 since Prince de Merode has been the head of the park).<\/p>\n The violence is something that never gets easy to deal with, according to Gouspillou.<\/p>\n \u201cYou have something like 300 different gangs in the region,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen we started in 2020, Emmanuel told us it had gotten calmer as compared to previous years. However, since then, it\u2019s gotten worse every year,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n Despite the challenging circumstances, Gouspillou remains optimistic. He\u2019s seen the positive effects Bitcoin mining has had not just in the DRC, but next door in the Republic of the Congo, where Gouspillou and his team now operate, as well.<\/p>\n BigBlock Datacenter has built one of their newest facilities in Liouesso, a town in the north of the country. In this region, there\u2019s hardly any industry, in part due to a lack of electrification, but that\u2019s changing due to the mining operations.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen you give money to the producer of electricity, you change the life of a region,\u201d Gouspillou explained.<\/p>\n \u201cIn the town, they have a 20 megawatt power plant, but they only use two to three megawatts to feed the town. So, we built a 12 megawatt farm there,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n \u201cFor the electricity provider, this is very important. We are a big client for him. He can now pull the lines to bring electricity to some small village because he has some money.\u201d<\/p>\n The effect that Gouspillou described is the same as what\u2019s happening in Kenya, Botswana and Malawi, the countries in which Gridless<\/a>, another Bitcoin mining company, operates. Like BigBlock Datacenter, Gridless purchases excess power from hydroelectric power plants in rural Africa, giving energy providers a new stream of revenue, allowing them to expand their operations further into the countryside. This process gives some African communities access to electricity for the first time<\/a>.<\/p>\n Gouspillou described how it\u2019s virtually a no-brainer to take advantage of this excess power, as many hydroelectric plants in Africa are built to produce more power than they\u2019re capable of dispensing.<\/p>\n \u201cYou have so many big hydro power plants, and they don’t have the lines to distribute this electricity,\u201d said Gouspillou.<\/p>\n \u201cIn Cameroon right now, a big dam built by EDF (\u00c9lectricit\u00e9 de France, France\u2019s national power company) produces 80% more electricity than it distributes,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen you create a big power plant, it\u2019s normally too big \u2014 wherever you build it \u2014 because there\u2019s no benefit to building too small. Building a 200 megawatt plant costs doesn’t cost double what building a 100 megawatt plant costs.\u201d<\/p>\n Gouspillou went on to describe how he advised Nemo Semret<\/a>, the first Bitcoin miner in Ethiopia, who now helps oversee the country\u2019s large-scale, state-sponsored mining operations<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cI gave him some advice on how to make mining containers four years ago, and now the country is mining with 600 megawatts,\u201d Gouspillou said. \u201cThere\u2019s huge potential for expansion there, too.\u201d<\/p>\n Beyond furthering the electrification of rural Africa, Gouspillou\u2019s mining efforts are having other notably positive impacts on their surrounding communities, as well.<\/p>\n BigBlock Datacenter\u2019s new farm in Liouesso currently employs 15 full-time technicians and 10 service staff including cooks, assistants, laundry staff, cleaning and grounds maintenance staff and drivers. And it plans to launch operations for fruit drying in the second half of 2025. <\/p>\n \u201cThere we have enormous drying capacity: enough to employ over 100 people,\u201d Gouspillou noted.<\/p>\n More than providing community members with jobs, though, Gouspillou and his team have made other investments in the community.<\/p>\n A number of employees for the main farm in the DRC have children who attend a school in the region, which is five kilometers from the farm\u2019s camp. BigBlock Datacenter has provided a Toyota bus to ensure school bus service since the first set up operations there.<\/p>\n The children and teachers once walked this distance every day.<\/p>\n To help lessen this burden, Gouspillou first lent the community members his car so that they could drive the distance instead of walking it. And, more recently, he\u2019s brought in a bus to help transport the community\u2019s residents to and from the school in larger numbers.<\/p>\n Furthermore, BigBlock Datacenter has also made improvements to the school itself.<\/p>\n \u201cThey did not have electricity in the classrooms, so we installed it,\u201d said Gouspillou, who added that they\u2019ve also financed the repainting of the school.<\/p>\n \u201cThese are very cheap investments and they make a big difference for the teachers and students,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n Aujourd\u2019hui, visite de l\u2019\u00e9cole primaire. Gouspillou\u2019s Life Before Bitcoin<\/h2>\n
The Early Days Of BigBlock Datacenter<\/h2>\n
Opportunity In The Congo<\/h2>\n
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Hardships<\/h2>\n
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How Bitcoin Mining Transforms Regions In Africa<\/h2>\n
Community Impact<\/h2>\n
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y\u2019a d\u2019la joie. https:\/\/t.co\/CIxiZw7BAJ<\/a> pic.twitter.com\/arUeBc5nji<\/a><\/p>\n
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