Originally posted on 01/04/2018:

I've been scratching my head a little bit over SegWit since it was implemented a few months ago. I expected it was just a seamless upgrade and once enabled would speed up and cheapen all bitcoin transfers.

I was wrong. It actually requires an entirely different format wallet, one which cannot even receive bitcoin from a non-segwit compatible wallet (every single wallet apart from Electrum v3)

So the only way to actually get bitcoin into a Segwit wallet is to transfer it to a non-segwit version of Electrum V3 and then transfer it to your Segwit version wallet.


Once you do that, you can save on fees and transfer times by using it to fund books who offer a Segwit compatible wallet deposit address. Currently the only one I am aware of is Fairlay.

I haven't seen any books offering segwit withdraws though. (Fairlay might?)



Really good article here that explains the issues in more detail: https://btcmanager.com/electrum-3-0-...wit-addresses/

Looks a bit like the whole segwit idea was a bit of a lame duck from the start to me. I wonder if key players knew that and still pushed ahead with it...