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Comment by goodcanadian | Hacker News Reader

It's funny how all the comments seem to assume the conclusion is correct. I think it is far more likely that it is exactly $1M (plus or minus a couple of percent margin of error), and that the packing isn't uniform. It seems extremely unlikely to me that they would fuck it up so bad as to have $500k more in the box than claimed.

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I also think it’s funny that so many comments assume they would have lax accounting for the extra $500K, or that the artists could have casually asked for another $500K of old bills to use as filler and the request would have been granted.

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.

There was a danish artist that got a very large amount of cash to do a similar in spirit artwork.

He then named it “take the money and run” and showcased what amounted to an empty frame.

wasn't he sued by the museum and made to pay it back?

Sort of. A third party paid it seems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Take_the_Money_and_Run_(artwor...

This is so unbelievably funny. Thank you for sharing!

Non uniform in what way? If all the money in the middle is jumbled up and 50% air that's still extremely misleading. And it's not far off the crumpled up newspaper the article threw in as a possibility.

The conclusion that something is off is still right in that case.

See sibling comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44437004

The only way to verify is open that sucker up and count.

They should send all of DOGE to work on this very important problem immediately. /s

Whatever happened to the audit of Fort Knox?

Or why does it even actually need to contain 1M anyway, just do your calculation for cube size, then cover the transparent faces. Filling the middle at all, nevermind completely and accurately, just seems pointless.

Goes against the whole premise of "ever wonder what a million dollars looks like?" They could have just created a million dollar bill and hung it on the wall

I mean the math given showing the size for an actual ~$1M cube is substantially smaller is pretty compelling. The author puts forward the explanation that there may be voids in the cube instead of an additional $500k, but that doesn't really address the problem that this isn't the right size for a $1M cube.

in that case you would have to assume they stacked the money first, measured, then build a box to fit it

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