Reading Tower BFT Without the Jargon
Tower BFT governs how validators lock in votes across slots. In our reading group, we start not with proofs but with a timeline: slot numbers on sticky notes, votes stacking upward, and lockouts extending after each confirmation.
Participants bring questions from their own devnet experiments. One common thread is confusion between optimistic confirmation and finality — we walk through a real devnet trace where a minor fork appeared and resolved within two slots.
The assigned reading is the official Solana documentation on consensus, plus a one-page handout we wrote that maps Tower BFT terms to the fields you see in `solana-validator monitor`.
By the end of the session, attendees can explain why doubling vote lockouts matters for safety and sketch a simple fork-choice decision without opening a terminal.