"pt-kc" MUSE Witness Proposal (Peertracks founding member)

Hello, I’d like to present my proposal for a MUSE witness (pt-kc).

Main points described in body of message:

• One of the original 4 members of Peertracks (Started in 2014) Still active member of company and shareholder. Personally know all of the founders for years now. Very invested in the success of the muse blockchain!
• Highly technical and security focused. Have worked in Information Security for >18 years. Day job is on computer security incident response team, I also lead our Insider Threat group.
• Extremely trustworthy as demonstrated by my long history as an investigator dealing with highly confidential and sensitive personal and financial data.
• Very reliable-- at very large global networking company for the last 20 years and counting, despite a large number of restructuring events.
• Former system administrator with extensive experience keeping mission critical servers up and running.
• Witness name is pt-kc
• Seed name is seed-muse.pt-kc.net

Most of you don’t know me, however I’m actually an original member of Peertracks team (1 of 4), from 2014, back before we even had coined the name Peertracks. It’s been a long road to get to where we are now, and I have to say most of the credit goes to Cedric ( @cob ) and Eddie for the massive amount effort and time they have put into Peertracks and the MUSE blockchain— make no mistake— these guys worked HARD at this for what has now been literally years.

At long last we are finally at what I consider to be a turning point in the music industry, as well as the entire smart contract market, all thanks to the blockchain and some massively forward thinking. Living in Austin Texas, the “Live music capital of the world” I’ve talked to many artists (some of which are good friends) who’ve explained how difficult it is to make a living in music for a large variety of reasons. It wasn’t until the original Peertracks crew locked ourselves into a AirBnB in Houston in 2014 for an extended design session did I grasp how complex the payment structure for artists really was. What blew me away was when resident music business expert and founder Eddie Corral (25+ years in the music industry, a voting member of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Science, with 11+ million records sold) laid out a HUGE diagram on a whiteboard detailing who (writers, performers, recording artists, managers, copyright holders, sales people, etc) gets paid for what (writing, performing, managing, distribution, selling and more) and under what circumstances (radio, streaming, digital sales, physical sales, live performances). It was far more complex than I had ever imagined! During a later conversation with one of the top entertainment lawyers in the country we were told in no uncertain terms that whole payment process is a major PITA and a scalable solution was something that was sorely lacking in the recording industry.

I’m proud to be a part of both the blockchain revolution as well as a part of what I consider a breakthrough for all artists— from small town bands selling their music to their mostly local fan base to huge international artists— the MUSE blockchain has the power to ensure they are quickly and transparently paid with no chance of fraud or other misdeeds sometimes associated with the music industry. It really does provide power to the people!

Who am I? What makes me trustworthy?

While I’ve been involved with Peertracks from the start, my day to day job is equally exciting and interesting. I work as a senior investigator on a Computer Security Incident Response team for a very large multi-national company. I’ve been at that company for 20 years now and now am the lead of our team’s Insider Threat program. My primary focus for insider threat is intellectual property theft, espionage (both corporate and nation-state), sabotage, fraud and employee investigations. I work daily with both our legal and HR teams on some of the most interesting global cases you can imagine! While not working those types of cases I also work the traditional type of cases you’d expect in a CSIRT team— internal and external hacking cases, malware, all that type of thing.
Prior to joining the CSIRT I worked for some other security teams in the company and before that I was a unix system administrator for several years at my current company as well as several other large international companies. I love all things unix/Linux related and that is where I am most comfortable. For my day to day activities I often craft a variety of tools to meet whatever investigative needs arise, and for last several years (also since 2014 or so) I have been heavily involved in user/entity behavior analytics (U/EBA) and building entity risk scoring solutions.

Needless to say, a Fortune 100 company trusts me with highly confidential company and employee data, and you can too— have no doubt.

As a complete unix nerd and former unix administrator I’ve set up my witness with automated backups, realtime push notifications and automatic restarts of the software in the unlikely event of any failure. While I don’t want to get into the specifics of the security of the host you can rest easy knowing that I have locked it down and am monitoring it closely.

Please vote for MUSE witness pt-kc!

vote_for_witness YOURACCOUNT pt-kc true true