EuroBillTracker

EuroBillTracker (EBT) is a website designed for tracking euro banknotes. It was inspired by the U.S. currency tracking website Where's George?. ["Euro Bill Tracker Reaches 50,000 Registered Bills In 15 Weeks Time", [http://www.eurobilltracker.com/press/press-release-50k.txt press release published on April 12, 2002] ] [Saranow, J: "Follow the Money", "The Wall Street Journal", December 9, 2002]

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 wallet. 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 in no way 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. [ [http://www.eurobilltrackerforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=10810 EuroBillTracker :: View topic - how to enter notes? ] ]

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 [ [http://www.eurobilltrackerforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=10510 EuroBillTracker :: View topic - Gennevilliers Agreement ] ] . 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

Core figures

As of 19 September, 2008 [http://en.eurobilltracker.com/stats/ Follow your Euro notes in their tracks ] ] :
* Number of users: over 130,000
* Number of banknotes: over 50,000,000
* Total value of all notes: €1,000,000,000 (14 August 2008)
* Number of interesting hits: over 218,000
* Number of bills by country:: flagicon|Germany Germany: over 12,000,000: flagicon|Finland Finland: over 8,500,000: flagicon|Netherlands Netherlands: over 7,500,000: flagicon|Belgium Belgium: over 6,500,000: flagicon|Austria Austria: over 2,900,000: flagicon|Portugal Portugal: over 2,800,000: flagicon|Italy Italy: over 2,800,000: flagicon|Spain Spain: over 1,900,000: flagicon|France France: over 1,800,000: flagicon|Slovenia Slovenia: over 800,000: flagicon|Greece Greece: over 380,000: flagicon|Ireland Ireland: over 127,000: flagicon|Malta Malta: over 51,000: flagicon|Luxembourg Luxembourg: over 37,000: flagicon|Cyprus Cyprus: over 7,000: flagicon|Slovakia Slovakia: over 2,500

Number of banknotes entered (history)

* 2002 – 542,502
* 2003 – 1,035,159
* 2004 – 3,384,818
* 2005 – 7,565,309
* 2006 – 11,414,099
* 2007 - 14,672,857
* 2008 - 43,407,357

Software and hardware

EuroBillTracker is hosted on a dedicated server (AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ dual-core processor and 4GB memory) which is located in Espoo (Finland).

EuroBillTracker uses the following software:
* PHP
* MySQL
* [http://sourceforge.net/projects/phpbabel phpbabel]

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:
* 2004: Brussels
* 2005: Helsinki
* 2006: Amsterdam
* 2007: Berlin.

The 2008 meeting is scheduled to be held in Ljubljana during August 2008. Since then, new pan-European meetings are supposed to be held every six months.

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.

See also

* Currency bill tracking
* Where's George? (tracks United States paper money)
* Where's Willy? (tracks Canadian paper money)

External links

* [http://en.eurobilltracker.com EuroBillTracker WebSite]

References