There is this really cool social experiment/database online at this website called Where’s George? If you go to the website www.wheresgeorge.com you can input the serial number of a dollar bill (or any bill) and see if it is in their registry of dollar bills. If you find a hit on the database you can see where its been and the comments people have left. They even have a distance tracker. It’s this really cool and fun idea, because often when you get a dollar from somewhere you don’t think about where it has been. Who has had this dollar previously? Did a movie star use it to snort cocaine? Did a 21 year old kid use it to buy his first beer at a bar? You have no idea! Each dollar bill could tell you this amazing an in-depth story about where they have been and almost everyone is clueless to this fact! It’s incredible! How many distance has the contents of your wallet collectively traveled? Isn’t that an incredible question that you have no way of answering? The where’s George website does something incredible, it documents this kind of stuff. It allows you to see this incredibly unique story and show that you were apart of it. Well not directly, some people will input their dollars in and say who they are and stuff. Personally I just like to see the geotag data. I remember my best friend in high school doing this a few times, I never took it into consideration but I remember looking at it with him once. It was such a cool thing. You would never know if the dollar was going to be registered in the database, and if it was it was so cool to see if it was from down the street or like from 1000 miles away. This website has a really cool thing as well, you can add your email to it so if someone finds your dollar and checks it against the database it’ll notify you! It’ll show you the dollar and what they added and where. I think that that is super duper cool. I know that is probably very unlikely that anyone will look at the website as well, but that just makes it cooler. If you’ve logged a dollar and years down the line you just get an email saying someone logged it in that would be really cool and a nostalgic trip. It’s like creating a history for something, its incredible. I also find it funny that every US dollar has a unique serial number, I wonder if they have an internal service like this, that would be cool to find out. Since I was a kid I’ve always been obsessed with the ideas of dollars and currency and their manufacturing, it always intrigues me that our dollars have so much value because they are worth their face value but also so much work put into them to ensure their legitimacy. I love learning about stuff like this, its so cool knowing that there is a website out there that publicly try’s to keep track of these things! So please, go check it out! Go add your own dollars to the registry or see if they already have a cool story!

Thanks for reading!

-Ben