What is Colliderscript in layman terms? How does it work and what new features does it bring to Bitcoin? Does it require a hardfork?
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Co-author here. ColliderScript is a covenant construction for Bitcoin that works without needing a softfork. Functionally, sufficiently powerful covenants allow Bitcoin to maintain persistent logic and state on-chain, enabling "smart contract" functionality akin to Ethereum.
ColliderScript enables the same type of (powerful) covenants you would get from OP_CAT, a proposed opcode softfork mentioned in BIP347. This BIP also lists possible applications relevant to ColliderScript, including vaults and emulating CSFS.
I wrote an article on why OP_CAT (and consequently ColliderScript) also enables smart contracts and (Ethereum-style) rollups on Bitcoin:
https://starkware.co/blog/general-computation-on-bitcoin/
Nevertheless, unlike OP_CAT, ColliderScript is extremely computationally intensive. It answers in the affirmative the previously open question of whether covenants are possible on Bitcoin without a softfork.
Here is a good article on ColliderScript:
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/technical/colliderscript-a-50m-bitcoin-covenant-with-no-new-opcodes
