After discussions with Marshall Hayner about shaping a solution to ongoing contention about the Dogecoin Core tip jar, and receiving a first proposal I sent a letter to all parties directly or indirectly involved in the situation on December 9th 2022, to make sure that any solution was going to recognize the full scope and minimize future problems and risk, perceived or otherwise, as much as possible. You can find that letter here.

The letter is CC to all Dogecoin Core contributors, but I built in a delayed release to give anyone a chance to correct any assertions I made, in case I got anything wrong. I did that to save everyone potential drama. No corrections have been requested - this is the original letter I sent.

Subsequently, a lot of constructive discussion has happened, and steps have been taken to resolve the issue. During the discussions, which I had mostly with Ross, Marshall and Max, and a larger group on copy, a couple things were clarified.

[A] It’s important to realize that mistakes were made but it was expressed that there was absolutely no intent to harm and I accept that. I concluded for myself that the impact of these mistakes were enabled to become significant by a lack of transparent communication, and a lack of allowing dissenting opinions to be voiced prior to acting; if we want to make progress without casualties, we need to have the discussions, also the difficult ones.

[B] The main obstacle preventing corrections across all parties has been (and still is) appetite to take on risk. No one wants to make further mistakes in resolution and create future problems. Personal circumstances in some cases make solutions really hard to architect, and complicate fixes. But nothing is impossible as long as we want to have a solution and don’t give up.

End-to-end, the last discussed version of the plan to compliance is as follows:

1. Segregation is needed for funds that were transacted out of the tip jar. A new wallet has been set-up, funded and is managed here: https://github.com/dogecoinfoundation/corefunds - these funds have been kindly provided by Much Wow, Ltd.

2. Because the purpose of the tip jar was at times advertised as if it were to benefit Much Wow, Ltd, and individuals were instructed to deposit donations there, all DOGE received into the AC8 address other than the transfer of funds from the original 9x9 address and change outputs will be re-donated to Much Wow, Ltd, by tip jar custodians.

3. All non-compliant transactions, including those from resolving #2, originating AC8 will be made compliant by taking this out from custodian payouts that are on-hold. The remainder of this will be forfeited and benefit future contributors to Dogecoin Core.

4. Once all this is done, AC8 is clean and a key rotation can be initiated: 2 of 3 AC8 key holders desire to be rolled over.

After this process is fully completed, we will have a functional, compliant Dogecoin Core tip jar again.

I’m getting close to reproducing the full accounting on the AC8 address regarding steps 2 and 3 above. I will submit the results to the AC8 custodians first, and publicize it after review.