EuroBillTracker

EuroBillTracker

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Web address	www.eurobilltracker.com
Commercial?	No
Available in	English, and others
Launched	2002
Current status	Online

EuroBillTracker (EBT) is a website designed for tracking euro banknotes. It was inspired by the US currency tracking website Where's George?. The aim is to record as many notes as possible to know details about their distribution and movements, follow it up, like where a note has been seen in particular, and generate statistics and rankings, for example, in which countries there are more tickets. EuroBillTracker has registered over 117 million notes as of May 2013, worth more than €2.235 billion.

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 possession. 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 not 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.

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. This organisation, operating generally similar to Wikimedia, will be in charge of protecting the EuroBillTracker database and ensuring it is free of charge. 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 in early 2008.

Statistical facts

File:Eurozone EBT hit ratio.jpg

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.

Core figures

As of 1 January 2015:

• Number of users: over 196,200
• Number of banknotes: over 152,000,000
• Total value of all notes: over €2,800,000,000
• Number of interesting hits: over 867,000
• Number of bills by country:

Country	Notes entered (over)
Germany	46,000,000
Belgium	18,800,000
Cyprus	51,700
Vatican	5,600
Slovakia	1,070,000
Slovenia	3,700,000
Spain	5,040,000
Estonia	540,000
Finland	19,200,000
France	6,800,000
Greece	950,000
Ireland	1,100,000
Italy	7,500,000
Latvia	100,900
Lithuania	86,000
Luxembourg	180,000
Malta	1,007,000
Monaco	126,000
Netherlands	17,500,000
Portugal	6,810,000
San Marino	4,800
Austria	12,900,000
Andorra	27,400
Montenegro	15,100

Number of banknotes entered (history)

Year	Number of Banknotes Entered
2002	531,080
2003	1,016,793
2004	3,322,883
2005	7,377,815
2006	10,856,023
2007	13,724,936
2008	14,864,731
2009	16,192,463
2010	15,170,832
2011	14,736,986
2012	14,248,117
2013	13,692,838
2014	13,036,882
2015	12,506,391

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 Republic of Ireland

Since 2004, the community has been organizing a pan-European yearly meeting during summer. And after the 2008 meeting in Ljubljana the EBT users decided to organize also a winter pan-European meeting.

Year	Winter	Summer
2004		Brussels
2005		Helsinki
2006		Amsterdam
2007		Berlin
2008		Ljubljana
2009	Bologna	Vienna
2010	Malta	Florence
2011	Kalkar	Barcelona
2012	Frankfurt am Main	Munich
2013	Rouen	Rotterdam
2014	Lisbon	Turku
2015	Larnaca	Brussels
2016	Dublin

The Summer meeting in 2016 will be hosted by Malta, being the first time a host place will be repeated.

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. The visit was repeated in April 2012, during an international meeting.

See also

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

External links

• EuroBillTracker WebSite (English) (other languages available on the site)