EuroBillTracker

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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]

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.[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.

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.

Core figures

As of January 1, 2014:[5]

  • Number of users: over 180,100
  • Number of banknotes: over 126,000,000
  • Total value of all notes: over € 2,401,000,000
  • Number of interesting hits: over 723,000
  • Number of bills by country:
Germany Germany: over 37,900,000
Finland Finland: over 16,900,000
Netherlands Netherlands: over 15,700,000
Belgium Belgium: over 15,200,000
Austria Austria: over 10,300,000
Italy Italy: over 6,200,000
Portugal Portugal: over 6,000,000
France France: over 5,400,000
Spain Spain: over 4,200,000
Slovenia Slovenia: over 3,100,000
Republic of Ireland Ireland: over 898,000
Slovakia Slovakia: over 881,000
Malta Malta: over 849,000
Greece Greece: over 759,000
Estonia Estonia: over 268,000
Luxembourg Luxembourg: over 145,000
Switzerland Switzerland: over 122,000
Monaco Monaco: over 75,800
United Kingdom United Kingdom: over 45,900
Cyprus Cyprus: over 39,600
Poland Poland: over 37,200

Number of banknotes entered (history)

  • 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

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:

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

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

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?". Eurobilltrackerforum.com. Retrieved 2012-03-13. 
  4. ↑ "EuroBillTracker :: View topic - Gennevilliers Agreement". Eurobilltrackerforum.com. Retrieved 2012-03-13. 
  5. ↑ "Follow your Euro notes in their tracks". En.eurobilltracker.com. 2002-01-01. Retrieved 2014-01-01. 

External links

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