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Can bitcoin save a country?

Good morning! This Thursday, El Salvador's bitcoin experiment is having a rough week, Joe Biden bumps up his solar energy goal (a lot), Brian Armstrong has some questions for the SEC, and Twitter's new Communities feature sounds really familiar.
But first, a note about something new and exciting from our executive editor, Tim Grieve.
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We launched something this week that we're really excited to share with you: the Protocol Power Index.
A lot of media lists and rankings are just somebody's opinions about things, ranked numerically for a patina of precision. Others are based on something, but it's often just one thing — maybe annual revenues or market cap. Fine as a snapshot, but hardly a holistic view. And even those that do use multiple criteria tend to focus on such a broad swath of companies that it's hard to compare genuine rivals.
We thought we could do better. And the result is the Protocol Power Index, an ongoing project to assess the power of companies across the tech industry by digging deep into all of the factors that make a company powerful (or not).
All told, our analysis combines 30 data points for each company we rank. You can read more about our methodology here. But in short, we research and weight the data to give you a detailed and nuanced view of the most powerful companies in tech — and the companies best positioned to challenge them. And we're focused on the workhorses of tech, not just the big household names, to reveal where power is concentrated in critical sub-segments of enterprise, fintech and other burgeoning fields of tech.
Up first are observability, databases and robotic process automation. Next month, we'll switch to fintech and study payments infrastructure and consumer trading platforms. We'll continue adding a new segment every month to build out a bigger picture of power across the whole of enterprise and fintech. And we'll update our rankings as the data changes.
We're excited to share the Protocol Power Index with you, and we hope you'll share your feedback with us. We'd love to hear your ideas, too, as we build out a tool for making sense of some of the world's most important companies.
— Tim Grieve, Executive Editor
El Salvador's brave new bitcoin world fell flat.
The country's move to make bitcoin legal tender alongside the U.S. dollar took effect Tuesday, but was met with a crash in bitcoin prices and headaches with its new digital wallet as businesses and consumers grappled with difficulty in actually using the country's new currency.
El Salvador is the first country to make bitcoin legal tender. The plan was passed through the country's legislature in a matter of hours and implemented in about 90 days.
But there's no playbook for how to do this, and it showed in the rollout as the nation faced up to an array of technical and financial landmines.
Volatility will continue to be a headache. The answer to that, some people say, is stablecoins. El Salvador has vague plans to introduce its own stablecoin, a digital version of the colon, its pre-dollarization currency. But that's just an idea at this point, and bitcoin, with its gyrating price, is what the country has for now.
There's an argument that these are all just technological teething pains, a beta test conducted in public. And the dip in bitcoin could just be a "typical" sell-on-the-news reaction, according to Ulrik K. Lykke, executive director at crypto hedge fund ARK36. But it's clear that remaking an economy in real time around cryptocurrency is easier said than done.
— Tomio Geron (email | twitter)
A version of this story first appeared on Protocol.com. Read it here.
Singapore is fast becoming a global hotbed of tech innovation. It's easy to see why. Nearly 80 of the world's top 100 tech firms have set up outposts there, including Google, Facebook, Stripe, Salesforce and homegrown unicorns like the super-app Grab.
Elizabeth Holmes failed Theranos, but that's not fraud, her attorney, Lance Wade, said during opening remarks:
Brian Armstrong wants to know why the SEC has an issue with Coinbase's lend feature:
Amazon doesn't think Elon Musk is playing by the government's rules:
Elizabeth Warren wants Andy Jassy to explain why Amazon's algorithms point customers to COVID-19 misinformation:
Michael Donlan is Mosyle's first COO. He last served as the head of the U.S. public sector at Apple and worked at Microsoft before that.
Tom Conrad is the next CEO of Big Sky Health. He's been an exec at Pandora, Snap and Quibi.
Tina Dobie joined Calendly as chief customer officer. She's previously held leadership roles at WP Engine and Bazaarvoice.
Stephen Elop is Digital.ai's next CEO. Once the CEO of Nokia, Elop has also served as an exec at Microsoft, Telstra and Adobe Systems.
On Protocol | Enterprise: Box's Aaron Levie faces a big vote of confidence today that will decide whether he keeps control of the company.
It's been a while since the SolarWinds hack, but unfortunately it's still very relevant. Microsoft's Brad Smith gets into the details of what happened, including lessons learned from the breach, in an updated version of his book "Tools and Weapons."
Smith writes about the meetings that took place and the people involved in responding to what turned out to be the biggest hack against the U.S. government in years, and offers recommendations on how to prevent future attacks. It's not a quick read at more than 400 pages, but it's definitely worth a look if you want to learn more about what happened.
Business leaders say they choose Singapore for its modern tech infrastructure, strong government support, robust pipeline of talent and pro-business regulations (the World Bank ranks it No. 2 in the world for ease of doing business). Plus, its location in the heart of Southeast Asia serves as a launchpad into the bustling Asian-Pacific market.
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