A wallet too small to renew warns before its coins expire; dust never dies

The warning: when the Spending balance minus round fee is under the
330-sat round minimum AND a vtxo enters the renewal window, auto-refresh
can't save the coins — a wallet-screen notice (and a daily local
notification, when permitted) says to receive any amount or spend
before the deadline. New walletNotices feature hook renders under the
balance card.

The amnesty: sub-dust vtxos have no unilateral exit to protect, and
regtest proves captaind keeps cosigning their spends past expiryHeight —
even after the watchman claims the backing on-chain
(tools/ark/expired-dust-test.js). Only hal's own receive validation
stood in the way; it now exempts sub-330 vtxos from the expiry check.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_015QwAtBSpKvECqp1rHLHjJk

1 files changed, 7 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/src/ark/validate.js b/src/ark/validate.js
index f7aecb9..d09f6ec 100644
--- a/src/ark/validate.js
+++ b/src/ark/validate.js
@@ -36,8 +36,14 @@ export async function validateVtxo(vtxo, { serverPubkey, chain, expectPubkeys, a
   if (!vtxo.genesis.length) fail('vtxo has no genesis transitions');
 
   // -- expiry --
+  // Sub-dust vtxos outlive their expiryHeight: they have no unilateral exit
+  // to protect (below dust there is no on-chain output they could become),
+  // and the coinos ASP keeps honoring them off-chain after sweeping their
+  // round — an explicit IOU where the trustless path never existed anyway.
   const tip = await chain.tipHeight();
-  if (vtxo.expiryHeight <= tip) fail(`vtxo expired at ${vtxo.expiryHeight}, tip ${tip}`);
+  if (vtxo.expiryHeight <= tip && vtxo.amountSat >= 330) {
+    fail(`vtxo expired at ${vtxo.expiryHeight}, tip ${tip}`);
+  }
 
   // -- anchor: onchain, confirmed, and its output matches what the first
   //    transition claims to spend --