Follow the Money with “Where Is George”

I received a five-dollar bill with a URL written along the top: www.whereisgeorge.com.

That’s George as in Washington, the man on the U.S. one-dollar bill.

The Web site is a collective exercise in tracking individual bills as they circulate. You can enter the serial number and series number of any major U.S. bill.

I did so for the bill with the URL on it. The bill had previously been tracked in Portland, Oregon, 20 days before. It had traveled an average of 25 miles per day.

The Oregonian who entered the bill had a profile. He is the night manager of an inn, and thus sees a lot of new bills. He has entered more than a thousand bills, with only eight follow-on hits so far. I’m number nine. The site will automatically notify him of the location I entered for the bill.

Take a look at one of the site’s all-time distance leaders: a bill that as of March 2005 has traveled more than four thousand miles over three years. Starting from Dayton, Ohio, it went to two points in Kentucky, one in Florida, five in Texas, one in Louisiana, one in Utah, and finally two in Michigan.

To do my bit for the collective effort, I entered the other two bills in my wallet at the time. Follow the money.

Update, June 1, 2026: The original version of this post had the sequence of states backward for the example.