Peerplays blockchain launched, and throwing my hat in to the witness list

Today was a pretty awesome day.

A group of around 13 potential witnesses watched and waited for the Peerplays blockchain to launch all day, periodically checking in on telegram, and joking around with anticipation. In the mid afternoon hours, the chat lit up as one of the members noticed the 0.1.7 tag released on github, which compiled and attached to an already running chain. It was live!

The group set into motion, figuring out what was needed for this live chain, helping each other with configurations, and even lending PPY to each other to ensure the opportunities to get setup. Within a couple hours, all of the placeholder witnesses (the init accounts) were replaced by real people wanting to be witnesses, to help decentralize the Peerplays network and produce blocks.

All of this happened with very little direction from the official team itself - the little community really banded together, acted incredibly respectfully, and managed to get everything setup and working properly. I'm proud to have helped and been a part of it, it was a great group effort and I applaud everyone that participated.

You can view this small team of witnesses here:

https://peerplaysdb.com/witnesses

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With that being said - I'm tossing my ring into the Peerplays witness arena, and I'd appreciate your votes. My account on peerplays is the same as it is here, it's just jesta, and my witness node is active and running. The only way you can vote right now is via the cli_wallet, so most of you will likely want to wait for the web wallet ;)

While my main focus right now is still on Steem, there are some easy wins that I can produce to help Peerplays out, and I think that's where my value exists (at least for now). Without promising too much, here's a brief summary of this value:

• I've converted a stripped down version of steemdb.com over to Peerplays, and am calling it PeerplaysDB.com.
• I have run both Steem and Golos witness nodes a long time and have a good understanding of the technical requirements for graphene-based blockchains. I think I have proven to be a decently reliable block producer with no ill-intent.
• I've launched a Peerplays forum on chainBB to help foster discussion about the topic. I'll personally be active in them, since Peerplays is an interesting topic I want to engage with, and my experiences within Steem may prove valuable.
• Providing a seed (seed.peerplaysdb.com:9777) and a full RPC node (node.peerplaysdb.com) for public use.

I am trying to approach Peerplays from a more technical (rather than developer) perspective - which I think is a very suitable role for witnesses. My developer hours right now are being poured into both chainBB and Vessel, but running an extra witness node and being on call for emergencies won't slow that down.

The graphene family of products, whether related officially to each other or not, have a lot to learn from one another. Cross pollenating these communities is such a great strength they inherently posses, and I'm very excited to see and hear more about this fledgling new community as it springs up.

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Also since I know people are going to ask questions about Peerplays, here's a few answers to what I think you're about to ask:

• No, the ICO PPY funds have not been distributed yet.
• The existing PPY people are using for account creation comes from the BTS sharedrop - go find your account on peerplaysdb.com, it's your username prefixed with bts-. You can import your active key into the cli_wallet to claim that share drop account. If cli_wallet is beyond your technical abilities - you'll have to wait for...
• The web wallet/website isn't live yet - you have to use the cli_wallet on a linux machine, which you'll have to build from scratch. Not many people are using the blockchain yet for this reason.

Best wishes to the newly forming Peerplays community and the official team for wrangling all of this together!