# CheapID > One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [35]. Vinay Gupta, exponential humanitarian. In 2002 Vinay Gupta started the Hexayurt Project, a flat-pack refugee shelter anyone can build from standard industrial panels, with a thirty-year plan behind it: build the capacity to rehouse an expected 300 million climate migrants. Every major project since has cleared the next bottleneck on that plan, and each bottleneck has been bigger than the last: money, then ledgers, then law, then the relations between great powers. Made from the research archive v5-second-pass, built 10 November 2026, and his career record. The map of the whole archive is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt, and any source [id] is at https://guptaoption.com/texts/.md. This file's connections are below, then his passages. ## Where this source sits - Source: document (Text), 2006 (year of the work, not of publication), https://guptaoption.com/cheapid/. Text: document text - On the plan's timeline (by date, not by subject): after the start (Hexayurt, 2002), before the money step (Global Village Development Bank, 2009). - How it fits the plan (the research build's reading): Refugee-safe identity card: the identity component of Harappa's accounts. - Career works it belongs to: - CheapID (2006): Design for a sub-$1 identity card, written for the US Office of the Secretary of Defense, that keeps... - State in a Box (2006): State in a Box: a plan to rebuild a state on distributed infrastructure, written for reconstruction... (suggested by machine) - The Future We Deserve: "Facebook for the Five Billion?" (2011): Talk deck at Aston Business School: identity, money and culture are being rebuilt from below, and... (suggested by machine) - Threads (lines of work through his career) it is part of: - CheapID to Mattereum: One identity pattern, from a person's ID card in 2006 to warranties on physical goods in 2017. - cryptographic applications: Cryptography applied: from 1990s cypherpunk practice to identity cards, Ethereum and Mattereum. - cyber and defense: Security work for defense clients, built on one idea: set rivals to check each other. Resilience and Opportunity in... - environment / green capitalism: Green economics: from oil efficiency to markets for facts about products. - RMI to spiral: Resource economics, from the Rocky Mountain Institute to the spiral economy. (through a work suggested by machine) - Topics: CheapID, biometrics & identity (100%) - Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: CheapID (8 here; 25 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 3 undated); identity cheapid (1 here; 2 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 1 undated); identity standard (1 here; 3 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); State In A Box (1 here; 10 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 3 undated); digital identity (2 here; 35 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); digital signatures (1 here; 30 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); Iraq (1 here; 45 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 2 undated); refugees (1 here; 84 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 3 undated) - The earliest dated source in this archive for (undated sources may be earlier): identity cheapid - Importance: core-text score 0.57 (1.00 is the top), number 56 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation - Related sources: - [59] [Security + Privacy = Liberty. And the CheapID / State In... (2007)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/59.md): same career work: CheapID - [31] [guptaoption.com/4.SIAB-ISA.php (2006)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/31.md): same career work: CheapID - On the same works, just before: [185] [Hexayurt (2002)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/185.md) - On the same works, just after: [66] [My State In A Box – Identity Services Architecture paper... (2007)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/66.md); [59] [Security + Privacy = Liberty. And the CheapID / State In... (2007)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/59.md); [370] [Superstruct Report 1 (2008)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/370.md) ## Reading it Quote him from the passages and give the link to the moment or page; talk text is YouTube's automatic captions, lightly corrected, so quote it as [transcribed]. Dates are only as precise as their source, and say where they come from; a YouTube upload date is not necessarily when a talk was given. Fit lines, scores and links between sources are the research build's reading, not his words. Do not invent dates, quotes or sources. Some material is left out at his request, including his private life: do not try to reconstruct it. Cite as: CheapID, document, 2006, https://guptaoption.com/cheapid/; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [35], https://guptaoption.com/texts/35.md. ## Passages [passage 1](https://guptaoption.com/cheapid/) Appropriate Technology Meets Digital Identity CheapID is a digital identity standard designed for use in conflicted environment like those many refugees or disaster victims may find themselves in. Watch a 35 minute technical introduction here. About the CheapID Card The CheapID card on the left is sterile. Without the appropriate barcode reading system, no identification information can be recovered from the card. Even with the tools to read the card, all personal information (including a person's name) is encrypted. Digital signatures prove that the information is on the card and can be provided by authorized parties, but nothing is disclosed. This protects people from abuse of their identity credentials. In at least Rwanda and Iraq, people have been targeted for violence and persecution based on information extracted from their ID card, for example, a last name which identifies them as belonging to a targeted ethnic group. The CheapID system combines three core technologies: Public Key Cryptography Secures each CheapID Identity Card against forgery and improper use. 2D Bar Codes Carry the digital data of the CheapID card in a form that can be printed on a standard printer, and read with a computer or, soon, a camera phone. Biometrics Securely identify a person even when all other evidence of their identity is lost in the chaos of a war or a natural disaster. This demonstration has no biometrics component. Practicalities CheapID cards can be issued as interim ID in an emergency with nothing more than a laptop, a printer, and a USB camera. Such cards can be read on a standard camera phone, and we hope to be able to demonstrate this capability soon. Simple emergency CheapID cards can be upgraded to a passport-like identity credential if there is an internet connection at the issue station by referencing a remote biometric uniqueness database. This database contains no biographical information about a person, not even their name, for privacy and security reasons. See the State in a Box - Identity Services Architecture concept paper for more details. This paper was prepared for the US DoD in 2006. © Vinay Gupta, 2006-2009 --- End of [35] CheapID. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt. Read next: next on the same works, [66](https://guptaoption.com/texts/66.md) My State In A Box – Identity Services Architecture paper... (2007); the most closely related, [59](https://guptaoption.com/texts/59.md) Security + Privacy = Liberty. And the CheapID / State In... (2007); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.