So far, 55,000 people have entered nearly 900,000 bills, or more than $5 million worth of currency.
No, the site does not have a ticker clicking off the Federal deficit or political statements about the evils of consumerism. Hank Eskin, the 34-year-old database programming consultant who founded the site two years ago, said he had simply come up with the idea while pondering his pocket change and its destiny.
"It's a fun diversion," Mr. Eskin said. "Some people would call it a useless diversion."
It is also the kind of diversion that could be possible only through the Web. Once a bill is registered, the site reports the time between sightings, the distance traveled and any comments from the finders. "I got this at a strip club in Brooklyn," someone wrote about one wild single. A man in Bakersfield, Calif., who found a registered dollar bill the day after a major tremor wrote that it "survived the earthquake with the courage of a C note."
On the site's forum, chatters compare "hit rates"-- the percentage of bills they send out that are reported found. Four percent is considered a good return. Serious players buy Where's George? rubber stamps ($15 through the Web site) to make marking bills easier.
"I never thought it would get to this, but people are obsessed by it," Mr. Eskin said. "They'll come home and stamp and enter bills before going out to dinner to spend them. They'll get all their spouse's bills and mark them and put them back." A man in New Jersey has stamped more than 60,000 singles.
Joshua McGee, a software engineer in Thousand Oaks, Calif., said the site had changed his spending patterns. "I used to use my debit card whenever I could," he said. "Now I intentionally pay for things with cash."
He said he had once purchased a VCR with a stack of ones. "I asked the cashier, 'Could you use any singles?' which is a wonderful entrapment phrase," Mr. McGee said. He tracks his bills with a map, marking hits with pushpins. He had to expand to a world map when a Swedish exchange student took one of his bills overseas.
There is competition to get the most hits from the most interesting places. As in any game, some players try to cheat. Mr. Eskin continually updates his validation process for the 10,000 bills that are entered into his system daily, weeding out serial numbers that are obviously false or bills entered repeatedly by a person trying to claim a better hit ratio. Purposely bringing bills to other states and recording them there is considered out of bounds, as is passing them back and forth between family members in different parts of the country.
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Devotees of the Web site have taken to paying for everything with marked dollar bills. [/SIZE]<TD width=8></TD><TR><TD vAlign=top width=205><HR SIZE=1></B></TD><TD width=8></TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE><!--@--></NYT_INLINEBLURB>
"We do like to be sure that the bills actually enter circulation," Mr. Eskin said.
Some spenders adopt creative strategies: taping a bill to a balloon and letting it fly, leaving a 20-dollar bill in a book in a bookstore or putting a bill in a bottle and throwing it into a lake.
"It's self-advertising, which is really intriguing," Mr. Eskin said. "I don't know of many businesses that do that. A friend of mine at work said why don't I just stamp 'Saab' on all my dollar bills and advertise Saab? Well, you can, but what's the point?"
While Mr. Eskin, who has an M.B.A. from the Wharton School, would love to run his own business, for now the site is just a break-even hobby. Advertisements on the site cover some of the cost of the server, but not the 20 to 30 hours a week he spends maintaining the site and answering questions, including the inevitable one.
"Every other day," he said, "I'll get an E-mail from somebody who asks, 'Don't you know that defacing currency is illegal?' "
It can be, he said, if it renders the bill unfit to be reissued -- by cutting off numbers to change the denomination, for instance, or altering serial numbers. But stamping "Where's George" on a bill doesn't destroy the bill, Mr. Eskin said.
"It's still a dollar bill," he said. "You can still spend it."
Claudia Dickens, a spokeswoman for the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, agreed. "According to the laws as they stand now, the practice is not illegal," she said.
Even at $4.8 million, the marked money amounts to less than one-thousandth of 1 percent of the currency in circulation. And the Secret Service, which enforces the defacement law, has not bothered Mr. Eskin. "They've got better things to do," he said. "They want to catch counterfeiters counterfeiting billions of dollars."
It might be that very defiance of authority, that feeling of control over something produced by the Government that fuels peoples' fascination with the site. It also fuels suspicion of Big Brother.
"Every now and then someone will write in, 'Did anyone ever think this is just a big conspiracy by the Government to track where our money goes?' " Mr. Eskin said. "And a lot of time some of the regulars will answer: 'No, the Government's not running it. They couldn't build anything like this if they wanted to.' "
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is usually in the top three of the fifty states with regard to membership. If you are unaware of it, this is a site which allows the user to track U.S. currency as it circulates around the country. I recently bought a stamp and have been busy stamping my bills. I only have two "hits" but hope for more. In any case if you are interested check out the website it is free and, at least for currency and coin nuts like me, it is fun.
