Gathering Our Circles of Trust
Gathers the Circle argues that refugee “digital identity” programs fail because displacement is defined by unreliable power, unreliable internet, and broken institutions. So identity must work offline first and live with the person, not in a database. It proposes a practical, deployable “camp-in-a-box” stack: $0.80 NFC “Name Tag” tokens that hold cryptographic keys and enable physical MFA; “Camp Cash” scratch-off bearer notes denominated in sats for private, offline exchange; and a peer-attestation reputation layer that rebuilds trust without documents. When connectivity disappears entirely, the system continues through Bluetooth mesh networking, then later syncs to global relays and Lightning when any link comes back online. Creating a three-layer infrastructure (physical, local digital, global digital) designed to survive censorship, surveillance, and collapse.
