EuroBillTracker

Template:Short description Template:Use dmy dates Template:Infobox website EuroBillTracker (EBT) is a website designed for tracking euro banknotes. It was inspired by the US currency bill tracking website Where's George?<ref>Euro Bill Tracker Reaches 50,000 Registered Bills in 15 Weeks Time, press release published on April 12, 2002</ref><ref>Saranow, J: "Follow the Money", The Wall Street Journal, 9 December 2002</ref> 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.<ref name="EuroBillTracker About">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> EuroBillTracker has registered over 231 million notes with a combined total value of more than €4.2 billion as of November 2024.<ref name="EuroBilltracker Statistics">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

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.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

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.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> 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

File:Eurozone EBT hit ratio.jpg

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:<ref name="stats">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

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

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		Template:Flagicon Brussels
2005		Template:Flagicon Helsinki
2006		Template:Flagicon Amsterdam
2007		Template:Flagicon Berlin
2008		Template:Flagicon Ljubljana
2009	Template:Flagicon Bologna and Ferrara	Template:Flagicon Vienna
2010	Template:Flagicon Malta	Template:Flagicon Florence and Prato
2011	Template:Flagicon Kalkar	Template:Flagicon Barcelona
2012	Template:Flagicon Frankfurt am Main + ECB	Template:Flagicon Munich
2013	Template:Flagicon Rouen	Template:Flagicon Rotterdam
2014	Template:Flagicon Lisbon	Template:Flagicon Turku
2015	Template:Flagicon Larnaca	Template:Flagicon Brussels and Antwerp
2016	Template:Flagicon Dublin	Template:Flagicon Sliema
2017	{{{2}}}|[1]}}	Template:Flagicon Helsinki
2018	Template:Flagicon Murcia	Template:Flagicon Vilnius
2019	Template:Flagicon Munich	Template:Flagicon Lille
2020	Template:Flagicon 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 Template:Flagicon 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 Template:Flagicon 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

^{{#if:| }} 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

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