Some benefits of SegWit:
Primary the ability to make the current blockchain block size much more efficient, in real-world practical applications.
Since old nodes will only download the witness-stripped block, they only enforce the 1 MB block size limit rule on that data.
New nodes, which understand the full block with witness data, are therefore free to replace this limit with a new one, allowing for larger block sizes.
Segregated Witness, therefore, takes advantage of this opportunity to raise the block size limit to nearly 4 MB,
and adds a new cost limit to ensure blocks remain balanced in their resource use (this effectively results in an effective limit closer to 2 MB).
Transaction times will shorten
Hopefully, this will help get transaction times closer to the optimal ten minutes than the current times of 30-60 minutes, at least in my personal experience.
Other benefits include , but may not be limited to malleability fixes, an easier implementation of the upcoming Lightning Network, simplification of the addition of “smart contracts” to Bitcoin’s protocol, more linear scaling of sighash operations, the ability to start signing input values, increased security for multi-sig via pay-to-script-hash (P2SH), can add script versioning functionality, reduction of UTXO growth and Compact fraud proofs.
Source:
https://cointelegraph.com/news/summer-of-segwit-bitcoin-core-begins-segregated-witness-soft-forkIt will be certainly a breakthrough evolution and awesome much needed upgrade to the bitcoin protocol.
SegWit along with Lightnining Network has the potential to rise bitcoin price significantly, not to mention it will improve quality of life of every bitcoin user.