A study of Bitcoin as a currency for email-based micro-transactions

Abstract: Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency that has been the focus of a lot of discussions lately and has attracted a large number of users. Its offers many possibilities for cheap transactions and unregulated finances which has been realized in numerous sites and applications on the web and in mobile phones. One medium that seem to have been neglected when it comes to Bitcoins development is email. This is curious since Bitcoin by its nature seem to have many properties that would work well with texted messages. The purpose of this study it to analyze the current papers about Bitcoin to find the current status of email based Bitcoin services,  and try to analyze if email as a tool is a suitable medium to be used with Bitcoin. This analyze is done through a systematic literature review of current papers, followed by an examination of past and current Bitcoin companies that has used email as part of their service. In the end the results suggested that the low security in email, and the apparent lack of services that would benefit from an email based Bitcoin service suggest that a service like that would be hard to develop today and not very useful to the public.