EuroBillTracker (EBT) is a website designed for tracking euro banknotes. It was inspired by the U.S. currency tracking website Where's George?.^[1][2]

[edit] Characteristics

EuroBillTracker is an international non-profit volunteer team dedicated to tracking euro notes around the world. The site is made up of people who simply enter the information from the notes in their wallet. Each user enters the serial numbers and location information for each note they obtain into EuroBillTracker. A user can then see any comments from other people who have had that note. From this information, the site extracts:

• Diffusion information: Each euro country has its own range of note serial numbers and from this information EBT can generate diffusion graphs that tell us how the notes travel to other countries. See the Diffusion section for more information.
• Tracking information: When a note is re-entered, the users who previously entered it are notified via email. These hits can be seen in the statistics section.
• Statistics and rankings: Who enters the most notes, which are the top countries? Where are the notes currently situated?

Euro banknotes and coins were put into circulation on 1 January 2002 and EBT has been tracking notes since then. The site was initially created by Philippe Girolami (giro). Anssi Johansson (avij) has been assisting with running the site since mid-2003. Site translation and various other tasks are handled by a group of active EBT users.

EuroBillTracker is in no way affiliated with the European Union, European Central Bank, national central banks or other financial institutions. Using EBT is completely free. Unlike Where's George?, EuroBillTracker requires users to register an account before they can enter details of banknotes.^[3]

From February 2008 onwards, the website is supposed to be run by a non-profit organization based in Belgium, and called the European Society for EuroBillTrackers^[4]. This organization, working pretty much like Wikimedia does, will be in charge of protecting the EuroBillTracker database and ensuring a free of charge usage of EuroBillTracker on-line tools for everyone. Proceedings for the founding of the association are under way as of January 2008; they were launched after disagreements between the founder of the website and other webmasters caused a split of EuroBillTracker into two different sites on 24 December 2007. The two sites reunited no later than 12 January 2008.

[edit] Statistical facts

A map of Eurozone according to their EBT hit ratio, i.e. the ratio between the number of banknotes registered at least two times and the total number of banknotes entered in a country. Green represents a higher ratio.

[edit] Core figures

As of 6 July 2009^[5]:

• Number of users: over 146,000
• Number of banknotes: over 63,500,000
• Total value of all notes: over €1,290,000,000
• Number of interesting hits: over 308,000
• Number of bills by country:

Germany: over 15,900,000

Finland: over 10,100,000

Netherlands: over 9,000,000

Belgium: over 7,700,000

Austria: over 4,500,000

Portugal: over 3,600,000

Italy: over 2,800,000

France: over 2,400,000

Spain: over 2,200,000

Slovenia: over 1,300,000

Greece: over 450,000

Ireland: over 200,000

Malta: over 190,000

Slovakia: over 140,000

Luxembourg: over 51,000

Switzerland: over 32,000

Cyprus: over 24,000

Rest of the world: over 240,000

[edit] Number of banknotes entered (history)

• 2002 – 542,502
• 2003 – 1,035,159
• 2004 – 3,384,818
• 2005 – 7,565,309
• 2006 – 11,414,099
• 2007 - 14,672,857
• 2008 - 43,407,357

[edit] Software and hardware

EuroBillTracker is hosted on a dedicated server (AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ dual-core processor and 4GB memory) which is located in Espoo (Finland).

EuroBillTracker uses the following software:

• PHP
• MySQL
• phpbabel

[edit] Community

The growing popularity of EuroBillTracker has led to the development of a community of trackers, especially in countries with a higher usage of the website, such as Finland, the Benelux countries and Slovenia. On the contrary, the percentage of users with respect to the national population is especially low in some south European countries such as France, Spain or Greece, and also in Ireland.

Since 2004, the community has been organising a pan-European yearly meeting during summer:

• 2004: Brussels
• 2005: Helsinki
• 2006: Amsterdam
• 2007: Berlin
• 2008: Ljubljana

After the 2008 meeting in Ljubljana the EBT users decided to organize also a winter pan-european meeting.

• 2009: Bologna (March), Vienna (summer)
• 2010: Malta (March)

Apart from the yearly meeting, national communities have been organising local gatherings at various levels; most notably, the German-speaking community has once been hosted at the European Central Bank headquarters in Frankfurt am Main in April 2007.

[edit] See also

• Currency bill tracking
• Where's George? (tracks United States paper money)
• Where's Willy? (tracks Canadian paper money)
• TrackGandhi tracks Indian Rupee

[edit] External links

• EuroBillTracker WebSite(English)
• EuroBillTracker WebSite(French)
• EuroBIllTracker WebSite(Italian)
• EuroBillTracker WebSite(German)
• EuroBillTracker WebSite(Polish)
• EuroBIllTracker WebSite(Dutch)

[edit] References

1. ^ Euro Bill Tracker Reaches 50,000 Registered Bills In 15 Weeks Time, press release published on April 12, 2002
2. ^ Saranow, J: "Follow the Money", The Wall Street Journal, December 9, 2002
3. ^ EuroBillTracker :: View topic - how to enter notes?
4. ^ EuroBillTracker :: View topic - Gennevilliers Agreement
5. ^ Follow your Euro notes in their tracks