As reported by Cointelegraph the patent was actually filed in March 2015, but for some reason it has risen to prominence in recent days; But let's go in order and explain better what we're talking about. Brian Armstrong, CEO of coinbase, has patented a system that allows users to exchange bitcoins via email without paying any commission. Analyzing the description of the patent the feeling is that we are faced with a sort of forerunner of Lightning Network, on closer inspection, in fact, the whole system is based on the opening of payment channels and seems to be nothing more than a system to scale off chain exactly as LN does. Many users, not for nothing, have expressed their criticisms of this model, first of all because it favors centralization, in practice the same criticism moved by many at LN, and secondly because it is considered too transparent; according to many twitter accounts, which intervened to have their say on this patent, associating the transactions with email addresses would allow to easily go back to the owner of a transaction, it would therefore be a system that is not at all anonymous and difficult to anonymize.

In any case, the idea of ​​using email addresses to move bitcoins does not seem so bad to me and probably in the near future there will be the possibility of doing something like that, not necessarily starting from the same model that Amstrong imagined in his patent; moreover, mass adoption of cryptocurrencies also passes, and perhaps above all, through the integration with technology that is already widespread, which is why smartphones are considered so important for the growth of the blockchain industry and the same thing, I believe , may also apply to emails. It remains to be seen what the advantages of a system like the one envisioned by the CEO of Coinbase, which certainly made sense in 2015, but which I do not think we have today that the lightning network is growing in an important way; another thing to consider is the possibility that in the future wallets will replace emails, since through a blockchain it is possible to exchange messages too I don't think it is possible to exclude a priori the possibility that tomorrow instead of using mail accounts hosted on server a third-party system is born that allows users to directly manage an e-mail service through their wallet. It is certainly true that, at the present state of things, running e-mail on a POW blockchain would end up flooding the net, but it is not said that such a system must necessarily be built on bitcoin blockchain, it could be for example implemented on blockchain ethereum, especially since ETH is attempting to implement a new POS consent protocol precisely to solve scalability problems.