Is there a reason we don’t have fork identifiers? I really dislike that we are beholden to miners to upgrade to a fork. As a user, if I want to participate in a hard fork I should be able to do so even with none of the miners switching their work over. I believe at the moment Ethereum clients are designed such that they will follow the heaviest chain of either the old code or the new code, which means miners must upgrade in order for me to upgrade. At some point, there may be a change that miners don’t voluntarily upgrade to but all economic participants do upgrade to. In this scenario the majority of miners should not be able to prevent my client from switching to the fork.
It sounds like this is effectively what happened with Ropsten, and it feels like can be simply fixed by including a fork identifier in the block headers such that my client will ignore any blocks that are not part of my desired fork.