https://blog.openbazaar.org/openbazaar-ecosystem-psychedelic-rock-band-myco/
My band and it's openbazaar store was featured on Openbazaars blog today in accordance with our debut EP release. Check it out at the link above or read the excerpt pasted below.
In these posts we take a look at some unique members of the OpenBazaar ecosystem. Today we interview Kyle from the band Myco, which released their new EP exclusively on OpenBazaar for the first week. You can find the Myco store on OpenBazaar, and on Duosearch as well.
Tell us a bit about yourself?
My name is Kyle Henry, I’m from Kansas City and started Myco in 2015 after moving back to Kansas City from Hong Kong, where I lived between 2013 and 2015 and taught English as my primary job. Before moving to Hong Kong I studied botany and mycology and discovered how amazing fungus really is. It is essentially the backbone of ecological systems on land and acts as a decentralized network or internet for organisms on the earth. Plants and fungus form symbiotic relationships and communicate through these fungal networks. A few years later after I had begun my scientific studies I got involved with bitcoin in 2011 when I started mining them with my GPU. The next year it became pretty much impossible to do so, but I mined about 15 before that happened. While in Hong Kong I continued promoting and using bitcoin and talking to Hong Kong natives about it where ever I went. I found that many people in the tech field there were already aware of bitcoin but most weren’t involved in it. While living there I used bitcoin to transfer money between my bank accounts in the US and Hong Kong. Instead of paying ridiculous fees to do such a thing through my bank I used exchanges and often made a profit when transferring funds. I ended up moving back to Kansas city in 2015 and started on my project. I’ve been a musician since I was about 14 and I had never officially released anything but music is my passion so I set out to make a project that embodied my beliefs of everything being interconnected and how decentralization and specifically blockchain technology can free us from our slavery. After writing and recording everything I set out to find band members to play live shows and I’ve gone through many members but eventually asked a good friend of mine Andrew MacIntyre to play drums for me. Then I found an amazing guitarist named Jesse Rodriguez and a bassist named Cory Yeager online who have helped me complete this project.
The first song we released is called “Myceliated” and is essentially about fungus and the effect it has on the universe and the human experience as well as decentralization and how bitcoin can end wars. We released this single with a bitcoin qr code on the cover and had a tremendous response from the bitcoin community. We also put a digital download of this song on OpenBazaar once OpenBazaar went public. Months later after a lot of practice the band is ready to start playing shows and we decided to release our debut 5 song EP exclusively on OpenBazaar on September 22 2016 to show our support for decentralization and freedom. The self titled EP will be released globally on most music platforms in fiat currencies on September 26 2016, but we prefer being paid directly in bitcoin.
What do you make / sell?
Original psychedelic rock music.
Why are you selling your product on OpenBazaar?
We want to support innovative platforms that make free trade and liberty possible in this ever increasing statist world.
How has your experience been with OpenBazaar so far?
Openbazaar and it’s community has been great to us so far, we have heard nothing but praise from those who have purchased our music and if we have need help with setting anything up or doing anything on OpenBazaar there has always been incredibly helpful people.
What changes would you like to see to OpenBazaar to make it more useful for you?
I would love to see a feature that allows us to setup a digital download automatically so we don’t have to manually enter everything for every single order. Also, I think it would be great if there were anonymity features built in for other users.. this I believe would push OpenBazaar into the mainstream as it would allow for free trade without the worry of government locking you in a cage.
Anything else you’d like to say?
My favorite author Aldous Huxley once said in the foreword of his book Brave New World “Only a large-scale popular movement toward decentralization and self-help can arrest the present tendency toward statism” When he wrote this in 1932 there was no such movement but now with bitcoin and blockchain technology we have such a movement. Our goal is to spread the message of freedom through decentralization and push the movement further into the mainstream.