Currency bill tracking
Currency bill tracking is the process (usually facilitated by any one of a number of websites set up for the purpose) of tracking the movements of banknotes, similar to how ornithologists track migrations of birds by ringing them. Currency bill tracking sites can track currency among the users of that website. A user may register a bill by entering its serial number, and if someone else has already registered the bill, then the "route" of the bill can be displayed.
Some bill tracking sites encourage marking before spending, whereas others do not. This usually depends on the laws of the country issuing the currency.
Popular currency bill tracking websites
Some of the most popular websites for bill tracking include the following:
- Where's George?, started in December 1998, was the first site to start a currency bill tracking project and remains the most popular of the sites, with nearly $1 billion worth of notes entered as of December 2010. It was created by Hank Eskin to track US dollars. The site has led to the creation of many other bill tracking sites. [1]
- Where's Willy? for CAD (Canada). Despite the website starting up two years after Canadian Money Tracker, it is the most popular of the Canadian currency tracking sites. [2]
- Where Have I Been? for CAD and US dollars [3]
- TrackDollar for US dollars (defunct?) [4]
- Canadian Money Tracker, started in 1999, for CAD (Canada)
- EuroBillTracker was started on January 1, 2002 to track euro banknotes. It is the largest of the euro tracking sites. [5]
- EuroTracer, the second-largest euro-tracking site, also studies the systems of serial numbers and printer codes of euro banknotes and the distribution of euro coins with their different national faces.[citation needed]
- FollowMyEuro is the third site for tracking Euro's.[citation needed]
- myEurobill, tracking euro banknotes using Google maps interface. Developed with Ruby on Rails.[citation needed]
- Where's Lizzy, Find Lizzy, Cash Path and Fiver Finder track banknotes of the pound sterling. The first British currency tracking site, Doshtracker, is no longer in operation.
- The Money Tracker started in 2006 for tracking Australian Dollars, and uniquely tracks banknotes using an interactive map of Australia
- Where's my Bucks started tracking South African rands in 2006[citation needed]
- Where's Renminbi tracks Chinese Renminbi (or Yuan) in China[citation needed]
- TrackGandhi tracks Indian Rupee, started in India in 2007[citation needed]
- SEK-Tracker tracks Swedish kronas since 2004
- In 1999, Market research company Cint hosted a now defunct tracking service for 20 SEK notes, named after Selma Lagerlöf, whose portrait appears on the obverse. [6]
- ontabenito tracks the Mexican peso [7]
- Moja-Lova tracking Croatian kunas using Google maps interface. Developed with Google Web Toolkit and PHP. [8]
- Penzkoveto.hu tracks Hungarian Forints [10]
References
In popular culture
The act of tracking a $20 bill was the binding theme between various stories in the film Twenty Bucks.
A similar scheme to currency bill tracking - and said to be inspired by it - is BookCrossing, which tracks the movement of secondhand books which are marked and then "released into the wild".