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EuroBillTracker

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

EuroBillTracker
Available inEnglish, and others
URLeurobilltracker.com
CommercialNo
Launched2002; 22 years ago (2002)
Current statusOnline

EuroBillTracker (EBT) is a website designed for tracking euro banknotes. It was inspired by the US currency bill tracking website Where's George?[1][2] 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.[3] EuroBillTracker has registered over 220 million notes with a combined total value of more than €4 billion as of September 2023.[4]

Characteristics

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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.[5]

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.[6] 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

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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

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As of 1 January 2023:[7]

  • 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:
Inventoried banknotes per year
Country 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023
Andorra Andorra 869 811 271 1,112 306 148 177 331 328
Austria Austria 1,225,403 1,137,506 1,161,059 1,220,528 1,210,956 1,218,951 1,293,967 1,409,088 1,455,981
Belgium Belgium 1,793,210 1,573,113 1,344,476 1,156,809 925,171 625,024 576,298 582,592 549,726
Bulgaria Bulgaria 356 562 328 548 625 262 257 623 620
Croatia Croatia 1,737 2,096 1,415 1,176 1,419 738 882 1,562 28,425
Cyprus Cyprus 9,472 2,922 1,125 2,457 1,449 691 927 1,111 1,976
Czech Republic Czechia 4,371 5,727 4,538 7,056 5,427 3,806 4,123 4,395 2,482
Denmark Denmark 1,495 1,336 1,634 3,114 1,924 239 847 395 620
Estonia Estonia 142,842 165,738 152,274 135,889 77,147 50,547 29,019 25,628 24,014
Finland Finland 1,168,811 1,005,890 839,943 678,850 611,413 471,090 409,552 403,080 372,581
France France 638,701 570,728 451,130 429,167 401,320 328,495 327,687 342,236 715,083
Germany Germany 4,215,049 3,970,351 3,298,151 3,009,504 3,127,612 2,782,818 2,897,620 2,918,582 2,986,853
Greece Greece 115,004 99,217 69,496 32,664 20,401 19,307 14,887 24,593 47,436
Hungary Hungary 1,112 704 840 1,986 1,456 691 527 2,146 3,079
Republic of Ireland Ireland 128,210 153,314 128,223 107,285 83,260 43,053 49,598 50,907 50,799
Italy Italy 656,070 823,571 837,546 768,989 780,345 563,210 611,701 581,571 553,757
Latvia Latvia 44,425 49,598 34,989 34,270 35,937 21,349 19,620 20,143 21,310
Lithuania Lithuania 79,845 106,444 155,096 215,000 235,657 206,462 206,917 208,825 216,495
Luxembourg Luxembourg 22,693 8,868 8,383 8,494 11,383 11,472 11,112 11,761 12,732
Malta Malta 75,163 74,851 59,324 93,800 63,497 54,237 69,605 46,830 38,102
Monaco Monaco 19,141 14,719 6,907 910 213 184 202 186 1,970
Netherlands Netherlands 853,235 738,099 713,575 624,300 558,656 403,658 364,908 340,216 329,102
Poland Poland 6,180 5,304 5,752 4,513 3,395 2,018 1,841 1,540 3,086
Portugal Portugal 359,881 372,261 378,756 411,736 349,236 274,417 339,274 404,141 382,513
Romania Romania 2,189 1,148 1,295 1,419 2,885 1,775 2,088 3,416 2,818
San Marino San Marino 131 151 260 447 294 125 181 124 103
Slovakia Slovakia 98,997 124,420 110,501 89,593 92,701 85,748 122,424 109,124 126,567
Slovenia Slovenia 332,188 275,503 226,141 173,859 125,962 112,847 89,194 98,990 98,229
Spain Spain 384,476 378,765 333,951 279,585 257,200 196,947 284,144 352,653 443,943
Sweden Sweden 1,292 1,271 1,470 1,595 2,674 1,397 581 985 937
Vatican City Vatican City 138 189 151 185 152 29 45 82 116

Number of banknotes entered (history)

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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
2023
8,548,870

Community

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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 Belgium Brussels
2005 Finland Helsinki
2006 Netherlands Amsterdam
2007 Germany Berlin
2008 Slovenia Ljubljana
2009 Italy Bologna and Ferrara Austria Vienna
2010 Malta Malta Italy Florence and Prato
2011 Germany Kalkar Spain Barcelona
2012 Germany Frankfurt am Main + ECB Germany Munich
2013 France Rouen Netherlands Rotterdam
2014 Portugal Lisbon Finland Turku
2015 Cyprus Larnaca Belgium Brussels and Antwerp
2016 Republic of Ireland Dublin Malta Sliema
2017 [1] Finland Helsinki
2018 Spain Murcia Lithuania Vilnius
2019 Germany Munich France Lille
2020 Luxembourg Luxembourg COVID crisis
2021
2022
2023
2024 Under application
  • 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 Germany 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 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

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^ 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

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References

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  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, 9 December 2002
  3. ^ "EuroBillTracker – About this site". Philippe Girolami, Anssi Johansson, Marko Schilde. EuroBillTracker. 1 January 2002. Retrieved 21 October 2011.
  4. ^ "EuroBillTracker – Statistics". Philippe Girolami, Anssi Johansson, Marko Schilde. EuroBillTracker. 1 January 2002. Retrieved 1 May 2013.
  5. ^ "EuroBillTracker :: View topic – how to enter notes?". Eurobilltrackerforum.com. Retrieved 13 March 2012.
  6. ^ "EuroBillTracker :: View topic – Gennevilliers Agreement". Eurobilltrackerforum.com. Retrieved 13 March 2012.
  7. ^ "Follow your Euro notes in their tracks". En.eurobilltracker.com. 1 January 2023. Retrieved 1 January 2023.
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