Man how expensive was that contractor when your art installation requires $1M in cash and all the labor to assemble it, but you can't just tell the contractor to do a new box?
They can. But if the delivered box meets the ordered specifications they will ask for extra compensation to redo it.
That plus cost of shipping back and forth.
That plus any possible time pressure around opening of the exhibit.
That plus the fact that the Fed can obtain bank notes for less than their face value. (If they are for example voided bank notes. But they can also just order prop money beyond the first layer if they want to keep their museum work and their official business separate. Which very well might be easier for organisational, accounting and security reasons.)
Plus nobody wants to admit that they screwed up the box order.
All these factors would point towards just stuffing the box with more “banknotes” and pretending that all is well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rai_stones
> The ownership of a large stone, which would be too difficult to move, was established by its history as recorded in oral tradition rather than by its location. Appending a transfer to the oral history of the stone thus effected a change of ownership.
> Some modern economists have viewed Rai stones as a form of money, and the stones are often used as a demonstration of the fact that the value of some forms of money can be assigned purely through a shared belief in said value.
...
> Rai stones were, and still are, used in rare important social transactions, such as marriage, inheritance, political deals, sign of an alliance, ransom of the battle dead, or, rarely, in exchange for food. Many are placed in front of meetinghouses, around village courts, or along pathways.
> Although the ownership of a particular stone might change, the stone itself is rarely moved due to its weight and risk of damage. Thus the physical location of a stone was often not significant: ownership was established by shared agreement and could be transferred even without physical access to the stone. Each large stone had an oral history that included the names of previous owners. In one instance, a large rai being transported by canoe and outrigger was accidentally dropped and sank to the sea floor. Although it was never seen again, everyone agreed that the rai must still be there, so it continued to be transacted as any other stone.