Answers
How the Paper Penny QR system would work
The Paper Penny is in the design stage and no card exists yet. Each card would have two QR codes for different tasks. The code on the front is public. Anyone with a phone camera could scan it, with no app and no account, and see three facts from a public, read-only ledger at paperpenny.ca: that the card was truly issued, which city's program issued it, and its current status. A scan of the front is a lookup, not a transaction. The serial number printed under the code covers the day a barcode fails to scan.
The code on the back serves as the card's secure redeem code, and it would work differently by design: one scan, one use, by a signed-in participating store at the till. A short code printed beneath the barcode covers the case where it cannot be scanned. The ledger would keep that code only in hashed form, a one-way fingerprint, never the actual code. Nothing personal would be stored on or behind a card: no names, no balances, no tracking of who held it. Verification would live in the ledger instead of expensive security printing. This is how a paper voucher stays nearly free to produce while remaining hard to fake convincingly.
The same ledger is what would let a future cross-city system work: pennymap.ca would show which communities recognize each other's vouchers, if any ever choose to. That design reflects the project's standing rule: local machines, public proofs, no surveillance. Until a pilot is real, the QR system remains what this page says it is: a published, criticizable plan.
The Paper Penny is a proposed program. No city has adopted it yet. Owen Sound, Ontario is the proposed first pilot.
Paper Penny is a proposed community project by Mike Seiler (mikeseiler.ca), built on the map.ca stack. It is not legal tender, not a Royal Canadian Mint product, and not yet live in any city. The network map lives at PennyMap.ca.