Engineering:EuroBillTracker

Short description: Web service for tracking Euro notes

EuroBillTracker

Available in	English, and others
Website	eurobilltracker.com
Commercial	No
Launched	2002 (2002)
Current status	Online

EuroBillTracker (EBT) is a website designed for tracking euro banknotes. It was inspired by the US currency bill 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 220 million notes as of September 2023, worth more than €4 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 France , and called the European Society for EuroBillTrackers or Association des Eurobilltrackers. This organisation, operating generally similar to the Wikimedia Foundation, 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

A map of Eurozone countries 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 2023:

• Number of users: over 200,500
• Number of banknotes: over 215,200,000
• Total value of all notes: over €3,900,000,000
• Number of interesting hits: over 1,244,000
• Number of bills by country:

	Entered notes (over)
Country	in 2015	in 2016	in 2017
Andorra	27,400	28,200	28,500
Austria	13,900,000	14,120,000	15,330,000
Belgium	20,190,000	20,470,000	21,850,000
Croatia
Cyprus	54,400	54,600	55,800
Estonia	685,000	710,000	871,000
Finland	20,102,000	20,290,000	21,150,000
France	7,200,000	7,370,000	7,840,000
Germany	49,600,000	50,450,000	53,760,000
Greece	1,030,000	1,050,000	1,120,000
Ireland	1,230,000	1,260,000	1,390,000
Italy	8,200,000	8,360,000	9,220,000
Latvia	143,000	150,000	189,000
Lithuania	164,000	190,000	351,000
Luxembourg	196,000	199,000	198,000
Malta	1,060,000	1,080,000	1,140,000
Monaco	139,000	140,000	147,000
Montenegro	16,200	16,400	17,300
Netherlands	18,100,000	18,310,000	19,040,000
Portugal	7,100,000	7,260,000	7,670,000
San Marino	4,900	5,000	5,200
Slovakia	1,170,000	1,190,000	1,310,000
Slovenia	3,900,000	3,980,000	4,220,000
Spain	5,300,000	5,420,000	5,760,000
Template:Country data Vatican Vatican City	5,600	5,700	5,800

Number of banknotes entered (history)

Year	Number of Banknotes Entered
2002	531,072
2003	1,016,350
2004	3,320,821
2005	7,374,560
2006	10,843,152
2007	13,703,089
2008	14,820,569
2009	16,184,977
2010	15,163,651
2011	14,703,449
2012	14,217,909
2013	13,658,971
2014	13,008,377
2015	12,462,982
2016	11,769,011
2017	10,410,226
2018	9,583,954
2019	9,096,204
2020	7,531,961
2021	7,775,115
2022	8,026,847

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 organising a pan-European yearly meeting during summer. After the 2008 meeting in Ljubljana, the EBT users also decided to organise a winter pan-European meeting.

Year	Winter	Summer
2004		Brussels
2005		Helsinki
2006		Template:Country data Holland Amsterdam
2007		Berlin
2008		Ljubljana
2009	Bologna and Ferrara	Vienna
2010	Malta	Florence and Prato
2011	Kalkar	Barcelona
2012	Frankfurt am Main + ECB	Munich
2013	Rouen	Template:Country data Holland Rotterdam
2014	Lisbon	Turku
2015	Larnaca	Brussels and Antwerp
2016	Dublin	Sliema
2017		Helsinki
2018	Murcia	Vilnius
2019	Munich	Lille
2020	Luxembourg

• The 2020 Winter meeting will take place in Luxembourg during the weekend of 28–29 March.

Curiosities:

• The Winter Meeting in 2010 was the first where the name of the country was attributed to the meeting instead of the host city;
• The city of Frankfurt am Main was the host of the Winter 2012 Meeting, where the 10th Anniversary of EuroBillTracker was celebrated;
• The Summer 2016 Meeting was the first with a repeat host (in Malta, which also hosted the 2010 Winter Meeting);

Apart from the yearly meeting, national communities have been organising local gatherings at various levels; most notably, the German-speaking community was once 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.

Notes

^ There was no Winter Meeting in 2017 because the only host that applied to organize the event did it outside of the deadline date.

See also

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

External links

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