I hope bech32 is more widely implemented ASAP, including on other cryptocurrencies, especially ones based on BTC addressing. Having a human-readable prefix that clearly differentiates between various crypto assets is a great boost to usability as Bitcoin adoption grows to less technically savvy people.
Thanks to the 0.16 Bitcoin Core update, bech32 might become more popular in short period of time. It isn't default type of address, though. If they forced people to use them then the adaptation would be much faster but there are many services and exchanges which still don't support sending to such addresses. It looks like they don't really care about fees.
I really like your attitude to Bitcoin Core's actions. Most people would like to push a lot of upgrades as soon as possible. It causes a lot of technical problems and tension in the community. Since scalability problem seems to be solved for now (assuming that Lightning Network will succeed soon), maybe it's time for making transactions more private? Although, I'm afraid that this could lead to ban of Bitcoin in more countries.
Service providers are not inclined to do any more work than their customers demand until they reach a point that they have to expand functionality in order to attract new ones. It's unfortunate, but unless the business sees a direct benefit (ROI) to implement this or that, they have no incentive.
But, like the very careful and deliberative improvements in Bitcoin Core, they also need to be careful with deploying upgrades to their platform. If I were an exchange, I'd hope I'd be able to have some staff engaged in the evolution of Bitcoin, at least aware of what is coming so that code to support potential PRs could be written and begin QA when it was still in pre-release. I know there are extra costs involved in doing that, but I also see extra benefits and believe that key influencers in the market would also notice and that could be a benefit from a marketing perspective. I think it's responsible for any major crypto business to figure in enough of a testnet infrastructure as well as a certain amount of payroll that would subsidize staff participation in the underlying open source projects.
That's my view, I don't believe that every business should wait until something is "in Core" before they begin planning for things that are very likely to be in the next release.
Best regards,
Ben
