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 231 million notes with a combined total value of more than €4.2 billion as of November 2024.[4]

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

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 869 811 271 1,112 306 148 177 331 328
  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 1,793,210 1,573,113 1,344,476 1,156,809 925,171 625,024 576,298 582,592 549,726
  Bulgaria 356 562 328 548 625 262 257 623 620
  Croatia 1,737 2,096 1,415 1,176 1,419 738 882 1,562 28,425
  Cyprus 9,472 2,922 1,125 2,457 1,449 691 927 1,111 1,976
  Czechia 4,371 5,727 4,538 7,056 5,427 3,806 4,123 4,395 2,482
  Denmark 1,495 1,336 1,634 3,114 1,924 239 847 395 620
  Estonia 142,842 165,738 152,274 135,889 77,147 50,547 29,019 25,628 24,014
  Finland 1,168,811 1,005,890 839,943 678,850 611,413 471,090 409,552 403,080 372,581
  France 638,701 570,728 451,130 429,167 401,320 328,495 327,687 342,236 715,083
  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 115,004 99,217 69,496 32,664 20,401 19,307 14,887 24,593 47,436
  Hungary 1,112 704 840 1,986 1,456 691 527 2,146 3,079
  Ireland 128,210 153,314 128,223 107,285 83,260 43,053 49,598 50,907 50,799
  Italy 656,070 823,571 837,546 768,989 780,345 563,210 611,701 581,571 553,757
  Latvia 44,425 49,598 34,989 34,270 35,937 21,349 19,620 20,143 21,310
  Lithuania 79,845 106,444 155,096 215,000 235,657 206,462 206,917 208,825 216,495
  Luxembourg 22,693 8,868 8,383 8,494 11,383 11,472 11,112 11,761 12,732
  Malta 75,163 74,851 59,324 93,800 63,497 54,237 69,605 46,830 38,102
  Monaco 19,141 14,719 6,907 910 213 184 202 186 1,970
  Netherlands 853,235 738,099 713,575 624,300 558,656 403,658 364,908 340,216 329,102
  Poland 6,180 5,304 5,752 4,513 3,395 2,018 1,841 1,540 3,086
  Portugal 359,881 372,261 378,756 411,736 349,236 274,417 339,274 404,141 382,513
  Romania 2,189 1,148 1,295 1,419 2,885 1,775 2,088 3,416 2,818
  San Marino 131 151 260 447 294 125 181 124 103
  Slovakia 98,997 124,420 110,501 89,593 92,701 85,748 122,424 109,124 126,567
  Slovenia 332,188 275,503 226,141 173,859 125,962 112,847 89,194 98,990 98,229
  Spain 384,476 378,765 333,951 279,585 257,200 196,947 284,144 352,653 443,943
  Sweden 1,292 1,271 1,470 1,595 2,674 1,397 581 985 937
  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   Brussels
2005   Helsinki
2006   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   Rotterdam
2014   Lisbon   Turku
2015   Larnaca   Brussels and Antwerp
2016   Dublin   Sliema
2017 [1]   Helsinki
2018   Murcia   Vilnius
2019   Munich   Lille
2020   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   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

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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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