The whole risk table
Safety & viability
The Paper Penny is a proposed program. No city has adopted it yet. Owen Sound, Ontario is the proposed first pilot.
The worst case is a dollar.
A Paper Penny's suggested face value is $1, and a card costs literal pennies to print. If a card is lost, soaked, or eaten by a dog, the most anyone is out is a dollar. There is no failure mode bigger than that.
Every code is unique and single-use.
The value doesn't live in the paper; it lives in the ledger. Each card's code can be redeemed exactly once. Copying the card copies nothing worth having, because the ledger only honours a live code, one time.
Everything expires.
Cards are expired through the system on a set date. The program's total exposure is always known: cards issued, cards redeemed, cards expired. No mystery float.
No personal data on the card.
A Paper Penny carries a code and a number. That's it. No name, no account, no tracking of the person holding it. It's as anonymous as the coin it's named after.
And on viability: handling coins and polymer notes costs real money in counting, rolling, transporting and banking. A card that costs pennies to print opens a gap between what it costs and what it replaces, and we believe that gap could fund small incentives, like rewarding debit use with a Paper Penny. A pilot's first job is to measure that gap and publish the math, not to assume it.
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.