Who Wants SegWit?

In Bitcoin the one thing that is still being discussed quite a lot it is Segregated Witness, the hot technology that the people from Bitcoin Core announced to the world in December 2015.

As the months go by and the realisation starts to set in that there is no way that the 25% miner support it currently has will get turned into the required 95%, we have to take a step back and think. Who wants SegWit?

Talking to companies and people there are a couple of reasons that people want to see SegWit activated, the most important ones are these;

SegWit is seen as the "first" step, its activation is required to proceed with Bitcoin innovation.

The question we should ask is; Do we need SegWit for innovative technologies like Schnorr, Lightning and Parallel validation and many others?
And the answer is, no, SegWit is not required for any of those.

SegWit fixes various problems in the protocol and those fixes help to scale Bitcoin.

SegWit has a lot of good ideas, but its implementation approach has made it tainted and over-complex. This together with the fact that Flexible Transactions is finished and does all that SegWit does, but much much simpler is the main reason we really don't need SegWit.

In Bitcoin, like any mature project, we have to prioritise projects one by one and roll them out safely. This means these important issues will get fixed, the question is purely one of priorities.
To be clear, nobody is saying we should not get the malleability issue fixed, it is just not the priority for this year.

And as I have been saying more often recently, the main way to get malleability fixed is to help get the block size issue resolved so we can get to the next item on the priority list.