One of the surprises of the 2020 Presidential election was that Trump’s percentage of immigrant votes grew. By this I me

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the past few years, the technology around us has had a major facelift in almost every key aspect. Living in a digital world, we’re sure you must’ve realized by now that we’re living in a world driven by software, where a majority of modern facilities and services run on a piece of code. The travel industry, banking, education, research, military, are just among the few major sectors today that depend on software to function properly.

For the first two decades of my life, being an immigrant was my defining characteristic. The neighbors saw me as an immigrant. The other kids at school saw me as an immigrant. The officer at the unemployment office where I’d go with my dad to serve as a translator saw me as an immigrant. And coming home crying after getting my ass kicked after school only to have my mother tell me, “this is their country, not yours,” made sure that immigrant was etched deeply into my foundation.

Today, that same transaction “would have a value of $114 million,” says Peter C. Earle, economist and research fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research. In honor of this pivotal moment, cryptocurrency fans and supporters call May 22 Pizza Day.

Once I left the immigrant bubble to go to college I got to put on my white suit. Again, my mother sagely warned me that, “immigrants don’t waste money on stupid things like art school.” On a college campus, I was now surrounded by people who I could choose, or not choose, to reveal my immigrant-ness to. I’d achieved the dream, climbed the caste system and claimed my whiteness. Huzzah. And then, proved it wholeheartedly by painting anything I achieved as a product of hustle, hard work, and intellect. Double huzzah. It felt great for a while, until it didn’t.

But let’s get back to the United States… because I am telling you these things, and making myself uncomfortable, only to make myself feel better about how uncomfortable I am about to make you.

So, no, seeing that Trump had gotten more immigrant votes in 2020 than 2016 didn’t surprise me. After all, when I attempted to talk to my own family about his xenophobia my mother’s reply was “Oh, he doesn’t mean us!” There’s always an immigrant group on deck for achieving whiteness. They’re voting for their turn at bat. And my family did indeed vote for him. But when you say that immigrants don’t vote in their own self interest that’s not true. We are voting in our own self-interest. We understand how this country was designed to work. We’re playing by the rules you set. We did, indeed, learn it from you, Dad.

To look at me, I am white. I have certainly benefited from my skin color throughout my life, but that whiteness was a suit I had to learn to wear. When my family moved to Philadelphia in 1970, they were moving into one of the most racist cities in America at the time, presided over by racist mayor Frank Rizzo. We moved into a small Portuguese community in a majority-Black neighborhood. We moved into homes and businesses recently vacated by white flight. We came in as Portuguese, and we needed America to make us white, because that is how America defines success, and we were here for success. (The irony of having to find our place in a caste system we helped to create is a cursed monkey’s paw implementation of John Rawls’ veil of ignorance, but I’ll save that argument for someone who didn’t go to a state school.) We hung the Rizzo re-election signs in our storefronts, later we would hang the Reagan signs too. We crossed the street when Black people came our way. We hired our own. And we adopted all the slurs. Our goal was to achieve whiteness, which meant hating blackness and hating immigrants. Every immigrant group that comes into America wants to be the last group through the door. Trust me, immigrants would rip the plaque off the Statue of Liberty faster than a Proud Boy at a tiki torch Black Friday sale. And every immigrant group knows the secret to achieving whiteness — patiently wait in the wings until the current whites believe Black people are catching up, at which point, the books are open, and the Irish are let in, or the Ukrainians, or the Czech, or the Cubans. In America, whiteness is a reward for stepping on others’ necks.

If you ever find yourself in Lisboa — and I encourage you to go, it is a lovely multicultural city now! — you may find yourself staring at one of its marvels, the magnificent monument to its sea-faring past: Os Descobrimentos. The monument points out over the Rio Tejo like a giant arrow, and it’s adorned along the sides by action-posed statues of the great navigators of Portugal. My forefathers. This monument is a bauble. It is meant to take your mind off other things.

And the biggest caveat for Bitcoin is that the inflation rate is set in stone by code. It cannot be changed. The US dollar is the antithesis of this, especially when the government can print money like mad and devalue our currency.

Just six kilometers to the east of that monument — and I encourage you to walk it because it’s a nice walk — you’ll walk into Pelourinho Velho (Old Pillory). It’s a public square. It once served as Portugal’s premier slave auction. Walk a kilometer to the northwest of that and you’ll end up at Rua do Poço dos Negros (Street of the Negro Pit), where my ancestors threw the lifeless bodies they’d exhausted. There is no monument in either place. In fact, there is no monument, or museum, in Portugal dedicated to its slaving past.

It would take more than a year for the first economic transaction to take place, when a Florida man negotiated to have two Papa John’s pizzas, valued at $25, delivered for 10,000 bitcoins on May 22, 2010. “That transaction essentially established the initial real-world price or value of bitcoin at 4 bitcoins per penny,” Grabowski says.

Early into its life, Bitcoin had no real monetary value, says Mark Grabowski, an associate professor at Adelphi University who teaches a course on Bitcoin and author of “Cryptocurrencies: A Primer on Digital Money.” Bitcoin miners (who for simplicity just imagine prospectors mining for gold) would trade Bitcoin back and forth just for fun.

We don’t erect monuments to shame. In fact, our slaver past can best be summed up by this quote from Renato Epifânio, president of the International Lusophone Movement: “Anyone who knows anything about Europe has to agree that Portugal is probably the least racist country in Europe. This can, and should, be one of our greatest causes of pride.” It can’t, and it shouldn’t be. The smallest asshole at the asshole party is still an asshole.

In February 2011, Bitcoin’s price crossed the $1 threshold. “For its first few years as it grew, its price was under $2,” Bitcoin bull Kris Marszalek tells money.usnews.com. “In June 2011, it hit its first bubble, rocketing to around $31 before sinking back down to the single-digit range.”

I was recently having a conversation with a friend about how people we know, and believe to be good people, continue to work at places like Facebook, despite the overwhelming evidence that places like Facebook are, you know… bad places. We discussed the obvious suspects: a good salary, overwhelming student loan debt, fancy job perks, and all those things are true to some extent. But I believe the biggest reason is shame. Once you admit your involvement in something terrible you have to deal with your shame. I’m not even talking about admitting your involvement to others, I’m talking about admitting it to yourself. To admit you’ve spent years working on tools to dismantle democracy is a shameful thing. Especially if you’ve continued working on them long after the point where it was obvious what you were working on was complicit in dismantling democracy. The easiest way to keep that shame at bay is to not admit those things are bad. Which is one of the reasons companies distract you with things like good salaries and fancy job perks. They’re shinier than the shame.