Why is SegWit adoption still incomplete?
SegWit hasn’t been fully adopted by all Bitcoin network participants because it isn’t mandatory, but also due to different incentives between users in the ecosystem.
Despite the benefits of SegWit, not all participants in the Bitcoin network have implemented it. To understand why requires familiarity with the many roles that people play in the Bitcoin ecosystem and how sometimes the incentives behind them contradict one another.
For example, Bitcoin doesn’t simply “upgrade” — it relies on wallets, exchanges and companies using it to upgrade themselves and push changes to the network accordingly. With no one mandating SegWit adoption, it’s up to engineering teams to nudge their organizations in the right direction, and this doesn’t always turn out as expected.
Billions were already behind Bitcoin by the time SegWit surfaced, so corporate bureaucracy saw only a small fraction of these companies act with any agility. The final decision on whether to “rock the boat” with new software updates and economics or to keep the status quo is in the hands of reluctant executives and not enthusiasts. Another misaligned incentive is that of the miners, who preferred to use AsicBoost firmware that was incompatible with SegWit but allegedly helped them to verify transactions up to 20% faster.