Action Plan for WT Paper and Code

[JSwambo]

Goal

Write a paper about WT wallet management with A1CP method of fee sponsorship. Present the model (on paper and through code) of WT and its environment. Simulate several case studies.

• 4 person stk-man hedge fund
• 5 stks 2 mans finance team of a BTC trust company
• ...?

Deliverables

• Design, formalisation, and analysis of WT wallet management algorithms
• Quantification of operational costs for provision of security by a WT
• Quantification of WT wallet risks
• Quantification of stakeholder activity

Tasks (incomplete)

High level

• Finish first pass of formal model for WT wallet & environment (Jacob by 23/08)
• Finish review and feedback of WTSM and WTSim (Antoine by 23/08)
• Finish Algorithm Design section (Jacob by 28/08)
• Settle on results to generate (by 28/08)
• Complete first draft (by 02/09)
• Edit and final touches (by 08/09)
• Submission & Code release (by 09/09)

Data collection

• Historic fees per block #15
• Update estimateSmartFee historic data (low priority)

Code

• Use estimateSmartFee for Cancel tx & CF Tx
• Use integers for all values with units in satoshis
• Add random time interval between balance low & re-fill trigger (to simulate slow stakeholder), to investigate time-at-risk.
• Handle V_m = 0 for early blocks
• Replace feerate data src with own node info (indexed by block number)
• Remove possibility for inconsistencies in progress of blocks with WTSim
• Compute & plot the amount wasted by overpaying fees due to inadequate availability of coins
• Track all operational information for initial deposits & actions from WT
• Optimise run time (to speed up generating & interpreting results)
• Spends/cancels that use multiple vaults
• Algorithm review
  • General line-by-line review
  • Consider ordering of outputs in fee generator for CF Tx
  • Reconsider all failure modes (then compare with enumeration in paper) and recoverable errors
• Create paper-ready template for plotted results (fig size, text & tick sizing, sim params)
• Tests module?
• Prepare code for release (PEP8 formatting, documentation, etc.)

Paper

• Introduction
  • What is Revault?
  • Summary of Revault WT
  • Related Work #20
  • Objectives
  • Paper organisation
• Methodology & Scope
  • Scope: Specify analysis for 1 WT in operational phase
  • Methodology: rationale for choosing LTS modelling language
• WT Wallet model
  • Why A1CP? Why prepare coin pool? Why not CPFP? #16
  • How / when to feebump Feebump algorithm #3
  • Spend/cancel transitions that use multiple vaults
• WT environment model
  • Formalise operation (event timing, deployment specific parameters)
  • Fix notation (if there is some "canonical" LTS notation)
  • Transition sequences with batched spend attempts
• Algorithm Design
  • Justify design choices
  • Determine trade-offs
  • Determine constraints
• Results
  • What to use as case studies? (n_stk, n_man, time-lock, expected number of vaults & spends, etc.) #17
  • Comparisson of algorithm versions (which algorithms?)
  • Interpret results
• Format paper for FC'22 Submission

Questions to study

• Extending results to system of watchtowers (either off-hand, or formally)
• Is it necessary for WT to output risk status info to stk (to make better decisions about re-filling)?
• Is it necessary to simulate feebump requirement? If there is enough in the reserve, WT will pay with amount at least as large as conservative estimateSmartFee value with target 1 block. Enumerate why this could fail.
• Compute the amount wasted by overpaying fees due to inadequate availability of coins
• How to notice and exploit the low-fee periods?