Edit: even still 41x41 floorspace is a very large flat.
The OP says it totals $1.5M ... and extra $0.5M
Otherwise, if the bills really are where they appear, then there would have to be some partial (cut) bills along the edges for everything to line up properly.
Ah, that'll be the allowance for inflation/devaluation.
lol
sums, averages, population, budgets, spending, rates.
Counting things is time consuming and error prone. Ask a casino. You can have 3 people count something and come to a different figure off by a few percent.
Seriously if someone says there's $1m in there, who is going to second guess? Thankfully this guy did.
Assuming the process keeps a single counter running continuously, it would be 1000 minutes, not quite 17 hours of work to do a single pass counting with one counter. There's a maintenance interval though. Some of the counters will scan serial numbers, so you could probably confirm you saw 1 Million distinct serial numbers while scanning. Multiple counters in parallel would reduce the wall clock time, of course. And you might want to do multiple counts, sometimes bills stick.
You could also count the number of straps and take a random sample to count. While counting the straps, you'd probably notice any grossly miscounted straps. If any of the sampled straps are wrong, you would presumably increase the sample rate to confirm. Weighing groups of 10 straps is probably faster than counting, but I don't know how sensitive it would be (depends on how consistent weights of the strapping material is, as well as weight of circulated bills).
I wish I remembered more specific details, but I at least assume similar levels of capacity for bill counting and counterfeit detection are available to nation states. Verifying the cash would be even easier and faster than you're describing.
Pick any industry which revolves around something, I assure you there is a child-industry dedicated to providing the technology and infrastructure to count the things.
Heck, accounting, as a general purpose, applies to every profession, profession, is at its core, focused on counting things.
Hopefully this doesn't come across as argumentative. Your comment caused me to reflect on how you're right, we trust so much when it comes to numbers people tell us. But at the same time, we don't as evidenced by the vast amount of industry we dedicate to counting all that we do, whatever it is.
An audit just means "it looks like you are recording things" but it doesn't mean "it looks like you are spending money wisely.".
Patrons see "passed audit" and assume the agency is run well.
That seems a wildly unlikely idea: Despite having three people checking sums, their daily profits have a few percent unknown variability in them.
Banks of old would famously make their tellers stay late to track down rather trivial discrepencies, probably as a deterrent to carelessness.
Cite?
So many reasons this might be exactly $1,000,000 but not sum up on the outside.
That said, this is also something I would have spent way too much time overthinking, so I thoroughly enjoyed reading the blog post.
> What if it’s hollow? You can only see the outer stacks. For all we know, the middle is just air and crumpled-up old newspaper. A money shell. A decorative cube. A fiscal illusion. The world’s most expensive piñata (but don’t hit it, security is watching).
43x43 piles of 541 coins each make 1000309 coins with a pile height of 541*2mm = 1.082m, while the width would be somewhat less than 43*26.5mm = 1.1395m with a hexagonal packing.
So just over 1m cubed, a little smaller than the bill version. But at 8100 kg, tons heavier.
Anyway, the weight would be 8.1 metric tons.
https://www.usmint.gov/learn/coins-and-medals/circulating-co...
(A party put them in front of the parliament to launch a campaign for universal basic income)
Hilarious and well written exercise, regardless. Kudos!
Notice in this photo how the side of the cub right/side - the bills are not oriented in the same direction as on the other sides.
Edit: Actually I reckon they deliberately oversized the container a bit so it's easier to pack the cash in. You don't want to build it too small! (Relative budget notwithstanding). Another design constraint it has to be a cube, and has to fit nicely to the dimensions of the banknotes on the front face (aspect ratio and size) without having a big gap on one side.
> You’d think this would already exist, a browser based tool for counting things.
Just want to point out that these apps do exist, perhaps not browser based. For example:
Bluebeam Revu can also do visual counts for specific symbols/images provided the drawings aren’t too busy, that is one use of AI I would like to see (automated takeoffs) so I don’t have to click thousands of light fixture symbols every year. One problem is that construction drawing are 2D and height information isn’t always present so measuring distance and accounting for rise and drop is difficult to automate, I use google maps street view frequently to gather height info (calibration is based off a standard commercial door at 80” x 36” or a CMU at 8” tall) if I don’t visit a site. Due to this and other factors, I think accurate construction estimating will be difficult to automate completely with LLMs, but the process will definitely be sped up by them.
[1] https://www.snb.ch/.imaging/flex/jcr:778b68b3-1344-4872-93d7...
Very portable.
(Yes, it's cotton not wood, but the weight of solid cotton is hard to find, and probably not much different.)
Cross-check: bills are apparently ~1g apiece. That predicts $1M in $100-bills is 20.8 lb. Very close.
Similarly, I always love it when small women smuggle suitcases full of gold in movies, when it would be heavy enough to break the handle off if it weren’t painted styrofoam.
The cube is almost certainly hollow, to cut weight and cost.
It's the idea of what a cube of $1m would look like. It should at least fulfill that requirement faithfully.
I realize the fed is not technically a government agency.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_agencies_of_the_Un...
The for-profit ones (Amtrak, USPS, etc.) are called SOEs.
The loan-related ones (Freddie Mae) are called GSEs.
Although an instrument of the U.S. government, the Federal Reserve System considers itself "an independent central bank because its monetary policy decisions do not have to be approved by the president or by anyone else in the executive or legislative branches of government, it does not receive funding appropriated by Congress, and the terms of the members of the board of governors span multiple presidential and congressional terms."[11]
I think this is the answer. I suspect the exhibit designers had a cool idea for a display, did a rough estimate of the area needed and then commissioned the exhibit builders to make the big metal-framed cube. Either they made an error in their calculation or the innate variability in the size of stacks of used bills threw it off. It's also possible the exhibit designer simply decided a bigger cube which filled the floor to ceiling space would be a better visual. Which would be unfortunate because, personally, the exhibit concept I'm more interested in is "$1M dollars in $100 bills fits in this area" not "Here's $1M in bills." The first concept is mildly interesting while the second is just a stunt.
Regardless of the reason it's off, I think it's most likely there's only $1M of bills in the cube. The folks responsible for collecting and destroying used bills tend to be exacting in their auditing for obvious reasons. So when the exhibit designers got $1M in used bills approved and released, that's exactly how much they got. It also stands to reason that they'd design the cube a little bigger than their calculated area requirement to ensure at least $1M would fit (along with some method of padding the interior) - although >50% seems excessive for a variability margin, so I still think it was an aesthetic choice or calculation error. Of course, one could do a practical replication to verify the area required with $10,000 in $1 bills.
Regardless, it's an interesting observation and a cool counting program to help verify.
I think it’s better served to use this as an analogy of how the federal government handles money.
Non-snark: Because it's fun to theorize.
Though I do sometimes feel the pervasive casual cynicism we have everywhere today sort of creates a self-reinforcing cycle as it preemptively erodes trust.
But who says that they didn't actually request $1.5M in used bills after doing the math of what it would take to make a cube. Or fill it up with $1M in used bills, and come back and make another request for $500k that also got approved...
I have a friend who works at a firm which specializes in engineering and constructing exhibits for museums and all kinds of public spaces. There's a whole industry ecosystem around doing this. They get brought in on contracts by design firms which specialize in permanent installation exhibits who get hired by the person responsible for exhibits at a museum or exhibit space. It's no different than most niche specialty industries. Even though it's comparatively small, there are still thousands of sites and hundreds of firms. People who do this specialize in it, develop long-term careers and have resumes they care about. Jobs for firms and people come by reputation and word of mouth. Delivering on time, on spec and on budget is crucial for survival. The facilities manager for this Fed building hired an exhibit space manager who developed a budget for this public tour project and then put it out to exhibit design firms for bids. The project was approved on a fixed budget and time frame. The overall budget the exhibit space manager submitted to the facilities manager certainly included the cost of the cash in the cube.
But the bigger reason no one was cavalier about just filling it up with $100 bills is that this exhibit is different because the exhibited artifact is of uniquely high-value (and unlike a Rembrandt, immediately spendable), so it probably had to have a security assessment and is very likely insured against loss (not just theft but fire/water damage etc). The cost of insuring and securing the exhibit was calculated before the budget was ever approved. Adding another 50% in cash would increase the insurance premium.
> "U.S currency is produced by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing and U.S. coins are produced by the U.S. Mint. Both organizations are bureaus of the U.S. Department of the Treasury."
But even if this exhibit was at a U.S. Mint site, your assumption doesn't account for how the real world works. The people involved in planning, creating and operating a public exhibit space like this on behalf of some museum, department or company are just regular employees who report to mid-level managers with careers in facilities management. I'm not an expert but if this was a U.S. Mint site, I'd guess that the bills on display would be technically 'retired' (or whatever term they have for bills that are removed from circulation). Since the Federal Reserve is a quasi-governmental organization, I can't really guess if these bills are similarly retired or simply cash, the time-value of which this exhibit space is carrying on their balance sheet. Either way, based on the way the real world actually works, it's almost certain the cost of this cash is very precisely tracked and accounted for on an audited budget that some mid-level manager is responsible for balancing right alongside the payroll for ticket takers, security guards and janitorial.
So it seems very likely to me that whatever money is in the cube is decommissioned.
As a side note: In some countries, central bank employees are the only individuals that can actually hold non-paper M0 (or MB?) money, since they get paid their salaries into a central bank account, which are otherwise only available to commercial banks. This used to be the case in Germany and Austria, but has been phased out at some point, as far as I remember.
But even if Fed employees just get paid in regular old M1 demand deposits, that's money nonetheless.
https://hrreview.co.uk/hr-news/strategy-news/bank-england-cl...
An engineer or artist that reliably find ways to go 50% over budget and generate contract extensions is a highly sought professional amongst vendors that specialize in the public sector.
In gov work contract extensions are almost guaranteed, provided your company also have the civic spirit of contributing to our democracy with health campaign donations.
Still, it does seem like it would be cheaper to rebuild the case than to add $500k to it. Maybe it's easy for the Fed to acquire more cash as long as it's guaranteed not to be spent.
I haven't been there but the plaque seen in the picture just says:
Have you ever wondered what one million dollars looks like? You don’t have to wonder anymore because you can see it right in front of you!
I would hope they at least used real bills they just took out of circulation for whatever reason but there can't be any real expectation.
It's a "stunt" only anyway coz a million in $1 coins would look way different. As would a million in 20s or 100s.
Based on Fed policy since 2007, they may be happy to hand out cash especially if it's going to be spent.
"Money printer go brrr" and all that...
The Fed doesn't acquire cash, it creates it. USD banknotes are liabilities of the Fed, but that concept only makes sense when somebody other than itself owns them.
And when something is budgeted for $1 Million, it is $1m nothing more nothing less
So this million USD might or might not have been accounted for, but it definitely does not need to be budgeted for.
Only if you're the central bank, but for them, it really is, yes. For everybody else, money held is an asset, since it's somebody else's (in this case, the central bank's) liability to them.
It could be even cheaper if these were old bills than needed to be pulled out of circulation. In that case they'ed be paying money to dispose of them anyways.
Here's $1,000,000 in $50 notes at the Reserve Bank of New Zealand Museum: https://fastly.4sqi.net/img/general/600x600/2817090_qnRbbX_q...
Simplest way to double check is if top and bottom corners have the same bill density.
Calvin Liang: "Ackshually ..."
~ Vincent LaGuardia Gambini
They have that maybe 50 feet away. It fits in a briefcase. Also, $1 million in $20s.
If it's 50% too big, that's a serious mistake! They should, like, take down the exhibit until it's fixed. You can't just make one of the bars on a graph taller because it looks more impressive, or your pen slipped, or whatever else. This thing is inaccurate and they should fix it.
It should be between 0.002-0.004 in. thick, so each band per bundle is about 0.004 to 0.008 thick. Might take off a little bit of your overage.
Last week I was watching that episode of Better Call Saul where he carries $7M throughout the desert for 36 hours, and realized his bags were supposed to get ripped 4 minutes into the process.
--
Calculation by Claude:
Here's the calculation:
A single US banknote weighs about 1 gram regardless of denomination.
So 70,000 bills × 1 gram = 70,000 grams = 70 kilograms = 154 pounds.
That's quite heavy - equivalent to carrying around a large person!
Those 70,000 bills would also represent $7 million in cash
* edit corrected the pounds calculation
Your answer is incorrect. You asked Claude to calculate $7M, which netted 154 pounds, but you then divided it by 10 instead of 7 to get the weight of $1M.
Further, it's quite irrelevant here, as the display involves $1 banknotes, not $100 bills. The correct answer, without the need for an LLM, is: 1 million bills times one gram = 1 million grams = 1,000 kg = 1 metric ton.
It would've been much worse if it was under though.
What??
TLDR if you don't have a half-hour: puzzles are usually cut with the pieces on grids, and not all aspect ratios are conducive to that with all piece counts. Like, you might want a 2:3 shaped puzzle with 500 pieces, and 18x28=504 is close enough.
Who gets anything out of giving people the wrong idea about what $1m would look like?
If you are commissioning the thing to be built, why might you want it to either contain more than $1m, or be hollow and larger than what $1m really is? What purpose does an incorrect display serve? A correct display already serves almost no purpose in the first place, now make it incorrect.
None of the reasons I can think of would seem to apply here:
Disinformation.
Advertizement.
Art, where the artists point was to make it wrong and never tell anyone.
Simple goof up? This one is at least plausible. Someone estimated wrong, got a local shop to build an expensive cube(1), well we got the cube we got, fill it and get the display up.
(1) That will have to be quite thick polycarbonate or glass, not cheap. In fact, that right there might expose that there is at least some kind of fakery inside, if the glass is not at least as thick as the aluminum frame, then it's not strong enough, neither is the frame for that matter if it's what it looks like. So if the glass and frame are as thin as they look, then there is some kind of internal skeleton.)
Maybe there is some other significance we've lost since it was built. Maybe the $1m was never the interesting point originally. Maybe instead the dimensions or maybe weight of the cube were the interrsting thing, and this is really something like "1000 gallons of $1 bills" and that just hsppens to come out to 1.55m.
Well, no, it's kind of like ordering two burgers and getting three.
Scan it and upload the serial to a database. If that serial has been registered somewhere else, before a plane could possibly transport it there, flag both registers to inspect that bill.
If the serial has already been registered as counterfeit, refuse the currency.
If the serial was not issued by the US mint, refuse the currency.
This would have the adverse effect of flagging valid currency too, but this could be worked around. I think it would make counterfeit much harder and have very little technical cost, since reading the denom and serial is trivial.
The Fed is extremely rigorous in tracking these things. It isn’t a couple guys in a room playing casually with millions of dollars. Even the retired bills are thoroughly monitored and tracked through their destruction.
He then named it “take the money and run” and showcased what amounted to an empty frame.
The conclusion that something is off is still right in that case.
...well?
1: we want a big cube
2: has to have a million dollars
3: should be stacked neatly.
Given the bills are so evenly arranged on the lower surface there's only so many squares you can produce with the bills like that. 8x19 or 6x17 . 6x17 is noted as close to 1 mill but they only remove 2 stacks from the 100 side. so now it's not a cube, you'd come under if you trimmed it down to a cube.
so stacked flat seems 8x19 is the smallest square you can make for one side for a cube of cash that fits mil. so they did that and just filled it up.
It might be hollow, there's certainly a void. There's some comments about the border but you can clearly see that the bills don't go behind the border so the corners are squared in, which means there's probably a weird void of some sort because it's not really a normal cube.
us dollar size: Width: 6.14 inches (155.956 mm) Height: 2.61 inches (66.294 mm) Thick x100: 0.43 inches (10.922 mm)
How close over a million dollars can you make this cube?
The exhibit picked a cube ~50 inches. 8 wide = 49.1 inch 19 tall = 49.6 inch.
But this assumes that having a perfect "cube" of bills was the artistic vision.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhFNiPsVRoM
[2] https://fiji.sc/
Though having an app handy might make sense sometimes.
Once you realise that the error bars are small (and it was mostly intuitive for me, probably looking at counting up to a hundred, so a few percent off is not a big deal), you stop worrying about the uncertainty as much ;-)
The cube did not cost $1.5M+. These are decommissioned dollars diverted from the normal process. The Federal Reserve is responsible for destroying currency. These bills are worthless. The only expense here is building the walls of the cube.
People from a "working class" background tend to see a massive pile of money, more middle class, a smaller pile, upper class maybe a cheque or a small stack of $100 bills or a bank transfer.
It's maybe one of the weirdest parts of the JBR ransom note (getting really off-topic now), "$118,000 dollars be placed into an "adequately sized attaché" consisting of $100,000 in $100 dollar bills and $18,000 in $20 dollar bills."
That would take up a really small amount of space, but if you're never seen that amount of money you might not know that (especially in 1996, pre-internet)
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Killing_of_JonBen...
> This is actually not a million dollars in singles. It is over $1,000,000. The box was created with the wrong dimensions by the contractor, but they still decided to fill it, display it, and claim it is $1,000,000. > > Source: Tour Guide at the Chicago Fed
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/2f9sp7/one_million_do...
And I'm glad you didn't find it because that lead to a great post.
Conclusion: Low, unless you're willing to take only a fraction of the face value.
Thinking through it though - you might be able to get away with spending the cash overseas, where it will take some time indeed for the money to be under scrutiny by banks to see if the serial numbers are out of circulation. There's then problem of getting the money there without anyone noticing, then there's the problem of what kind of characters you're going to be defrauding overseas.
All told - probably a better idea is to use all that cleverness to make a 1.5 million dollars the good old fashioned way: Spending a few years saying, "Nothing from my end" on Zoom calls.
As we say in my family: "close enough for government work!"
[1] https://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/wert-nutzung-gewicht-6-fakten-z...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/jens-haaning-take-the-money-and...
> "I'm afraid we don't, boss."
> "Let's inflate it!"
> "The dollar?"
> "Not the dollar, idiot, the cube! With air.
> "On second thought..."
>It’s stupidly simple: upload an image, click to drop a dot, and it tells you how many you’ve placed. That’s it. But somehow, nothing like it existed.
A small related story.
I once was an intern on a bioscience laboratory that was working with maize. My very intern-y job was to count the number of white spots on the leaves of like ... thousands of plants.
Improvement # 1 (not by me but a colleage), we scanned the plants, on a regular flatbed scanner, they were small enough to fit in.
Improvement # 2 (this one was me), the plan was to automatically count all the spots with CV but it wasn't really working that well; it was back in 2012 and the algos were not that good, they still missed some and we needed to be as accurate as possible. I ended up doing a web app very similar to the one in the article, you just loaded an image and start tagging stuff and at the end it gave you a count for each type of spot you tagged ...
... then we spent weeks scanning and tagging plants full-time :'(.
Jack Binion's sister, Becky Behnen, famously sold million-dollar display of one hundred $10,000 bills in '99 for (a rumored) $4 million to the currency dealer Jay Parrino.
(Supposedly) one of those $10,000 bills was posted on eBay for $160,000.
Like if I had a box with an apple and pear in it, I could put up a little plaque saying “There is an apple in this box” and it would be a completely accurate statement
I bring this up because the article and many of the comments here act like this "cost" the Fed $1.5 million to make the cube.
sdenton4•5h ago
This would probably be a hard case for it! But would be cool to see how well it works.
zefhous•4h ago
MadnessASAP•4h ago
stavros•3h ago
Ok, that's pretty a pretty good marketing line, I have to admit.
fragmede•3h ago
Veen•4h ago
cxr•4h ago
sdenton4•2h ago