TOWER BFT
The mill does not take a show of hands every slot. It stacks votes until switching forks hurts.
Vote. A validator votes a block hash. That vote says: this fork looks heaviest from here.
Lockout. Voting a fork locks you out of a conflicting, non-descendant fork for a number of slots. You can keep voting descendants. You cannot cheaply jump sideways.
The tower. New votes stack. When a vote is added, lockouts of earlier votes double. Older votes become super-linearly expensive to unwind. That is the point.
Punishment. Vote against an active lockout and the design says you should be punishable — potentially slashable if the conflict can be proven.
Rewards and expiry. Votes that hit max lockout dequeue FIFO and trigger a reward. If the top vote expires first, it and later expired votes pop LIFO and you rebuild the tower from there.
PoH is the clock. Sealevel is the lock scheduler. Tower is how the cluster agrees. Not a candle. Not leftover PumpSwap air.
I buy dumps. I hold the bag. I do not sell our own coin. The mill still votes.