The lazy man's geocaching

Several weeks ago I had randomly come across a web site that was sort of like the geocaching website which allows geocachers to log the caches they find. This site, however was designed for registering dollar bills (and other denominations) so their movement could be tracked. I thought it was an interesting idea but never did anything about it.

So I was surprised a couple of days ago to see Carolyn pull this dollar bill out of her purse:


According to the web site noted on the bill Track Your Cash there are 667 registered users and slightly less than 30,000 bills that have been registered on the site. With about 25 billion bills in circulation in the country the chance of finding a bill that is stamped like this is something like 1 in 1,000,000.

When I did some research I discovered a website that is much more active called Where's George. This site claims to have over 3.5 million registered users who have registered a total of 83.9 million bills worth $470 million. Now that's a database where there is a bit higher chance of getting hits. Not quite the lottery of the other site. In fact, according to their statistics about 11% of those bills that are registered are "hit" by being registered a second time. They estimate that about .065% of the currency in circulation is registered on the website so you have about 1 chance in 1,700 of ending up with one.

To play the game, you sign onto the web site and enter the serial number of all the bills in your wallet. Later, when someone else enters the same serial number, they will see how far the money has traveled since it was last registered. As a registered user who logged that bill you get notified as well. This is all done by zip code rather than actual addresses so there isn't much danger of big brother noting your spending habits - at least no more than there already is. Of course, no one will even think of registering the bill you did, unless you mark it something like this dollar has been. Our particular bill started out in Porland, Oregon last July so it has traveled at least 480 miles in the last 320 days or about 1.5 miles per day.


This map shows where the greatest "action" is, yellow being the counties with the most registered "hits" and red being next.

What I found really interesting in the comments for registered bills on Where's George was how frequently they had been placed in geocaches and had been making the rounds of the country much like the travel bugs that geocachers are used to transporting. The difference, of course, is that you use muggles to help move the "dollar bug" and you don't have to find any caches. Hence, the lazy man's way to geocaching.