A proposed community voucher
The Paper Penny
The Paper Penny is a proposed program. No city has adopted it yet. Owen Sound, Ontario is the proposed first pilot.
Paper Penny: the most high-tech penny on the planet.
A business-card-sized community voucher, worth about a dollar, that travels from wallet to till to wallet. Every card knows exactly where it stands.
The Paper Penny is a proposed community voucher for Canadian main streets, starting, we hope, with a pilot in Owen Sound, Ontario. Each card costs pennies to print, carries a unique code, and is collected and expired through a simple ledger, so the worst case on any card is ever only a dollar. It isn't money and it isn't from the Mint. It's a neighbourly nudge to spend that dollar close to home.
What is a Paper Penny?
A Paper Penny is a voucher the size of a business card. It fits in a wallet next to your library card, and it travels the way small-town money used to: business to business, hand to hand.
The recommended face value is one dollar. A city might provide the cards, or local shops could buy them or split the cost. This ensures the community that benefits shares the incentive.
Every card has two codes. A public status code sits on the front for anyone to scan. The back holds a one-time secure code for the till. Each code includes a printed version to type in if a barcode does not scan. The program's ledger handles issuing, collecting, and expiring cards. This system accounts for every card despite the use of ordinary paper, which is why we call it the most high-tech penny on the planet.
To be plain about what it is not: a Paper Penny is a community voucher. It is not legal tender, and it is not issued by the Royal Canadian Mint. It's a promise between neighbours, kept honest by a ledger.
The history of the penny
Canada struck its last one-cent coin in 2012 and stopped distributing pennies in 2013: the end of a coin that had been in Canadian pockets since 1858. The penny didn't disappear because people stopped caring about small value; it disappeared because moving metal around cost more than the metal was worth.
The Paper Penny continues what the coin started: it maintains the small scale and the sense of community while removing the cost of handling.
Read the full history of the penny →
See the map
Every Paper Penny program is local, and local things belong on a map. PennyMap.ca is the program's map home, where participating businesses and card activity would appear once a pilot is running. Today it shows the proposal: where a Paper Penny could live, starting with Owen Sound.
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.