Deposit addresses in Freebitco always start by "1". Is there any change about the format?
[Note: this is about a chat around there, nothing else]
They have been using the same type of addresses for many years, and I am not aware that they are going to change, but it would be nice to know why they have not yet switched to Segwit, when they could be saving on fees by doing so. If we multiply by all the volume of transactions and deposit addresses they have, it must be a lot of money.
I don't know if it's been mentioned since but the reason given by theQuinn some time ago was "Changing the deposit addresses to Segwit requires a major database reorganisation because the initial deposit address is used to index the accounts. To do that we would have to take the site offline for many hours to implement. Maybe if we have some other necessity to take the site down we could do it at the same time but we don't want to have an outage just for that."