It seems that there are serious mistakes in the 'old-way / new-way' comparison.
"How do you de-activate the fork?: Very easy – people stop running the Activator software. The soft fork just naturally de-activates."
Yeah, except now soft-fork-specific UTXOs are claimable by everyone onchain. It's disabled on the technical layer of protocol, but it wreaks havoc on social/economic layer of protocol.
"Who can be negatively affected by a fork? (In a way other than a reorg.)" ( and other points.)
Why would you exclude reorgs? Reorg is the biggest issue and blocker when it comes to soft forks. Basically reorgs makes it so the 'new-way activation' is not that different from the 'old-way activation' w.r.t risks.
You might use the new OPCODE from your softfork. But if most economic participants won't use your soft-fork someone will claim your UTXOs next block and you screaming "This is consesus invalid! Give back my coins" by your local Activator won't make a difference.
Care to explain how an UTXO can become claimable under such circunstances?
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In order to have soft-fork any changes must be backward compatible with old-code running nodes.
So how could you possibly add new features while keeping backward compatibility? You make it so old nodes see the new soft-fork UTXOs as "anyone can spend", while soft-fork-aware nodes can understand new data and enforce narrower ruleset on those UTXOs.
If miners/nodes accepted the softfork all new blocks will follow the new ruleset, but old-codebase nodes will still work fine unaware of new rules thinking those are just "anyone can spend" UTXOs.
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