Top
Best
New

Posted by c249709 7/1/2025

The Fed says this is a cube of $1M. They're off by half a million(calvin.sh)
1478 points | 552 commentspage 11
musa11 7/1/2025|
[flagged]
mv4 7/1/2025||
It's always amusing how people easily carry $1M cash in the movies.
nixpulvis 7/1/2025||
Those are probably $100 bills. So you only need to fill a bag with 100 bundles. Easily fits in a duffle bag I'd assume.
Taek 7/1/2025|||
In the movies, it's $100 bills, which are considerably more portable than $1 bills.
jolt42 7/1/2025|||
Would you roughly say 100x more portable?
IAmBroom 7/1/2025||
Using somat's estimate of 49" on a side, it would roughly weigh the same as 49^3/100 cu in of solid wood. Given a range of 0.01-0.03 lb/cu-in for pine, and choosing the midpoint: 23.5 lb.

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.

mv4 7/2/2025|||
sorry I missed that.
labster 7/1/2025|||
Yeah, that many pennies would be really heavy.

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.

kingkawn 7/1/2025|||
Compress the cube by 100x and you could probably carry it
steezeburger 7/1/2025|||
Those aren't stacks of one dollar bills though.
c249709 7/1/2025|||
if it's in $100 bills you can fit it in a suit case easily with lots of space left
tbrake 7/1/2025|||
well, using larger denominations helps.
sschueller 7/1/2025||
I think you could tell if the bill was purple (Swiss franc [1]) instead of green in the movies...

[1] https://www.snb.ch/.imaging/flex/jcr:778b68b3-1344-4872-93d7...

ffin 7/1/2025|||
the cube is full of $1 bills
cultofmetatron 7/1/2025||
obligatory

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/n6dJB8OcA8I

cies 7/1/2025||
Once more proof the fed cannot be trusted. They are a private (and very secretive) entity at the heart of the US govt, thus not democratically governed.
ysofunny 7/1/2025||
if the Federal Reserve lies about the numbers.... what don't they lie about?
ar_lan 7/1/2025||
Did they ever consider there could be a hollow core, or filler to account for the discrepancy?
IshKebab 7/1/2025||
Yes, I used my eyes to read the article and I can confirm that they did consider it, because they wrote it down in the article we are discussing.
ar_lan 7/2/2025||
Fair - I missed the "Empty Inside?" section. Just accidental carelessness. I appreciate the correction, though your tone was needlessly aggressive.

I will be more thorough in future articles/comment sections, and apologize for wasting your time, but please mind your attitude next time.

thinkingemote 7/1/2025|||
The exhibit rotates. It will have the same kind of structure shown at the bottom through the middle of it at the very least, and probably a sort of skeleton for stability.
ar_lan 7/2/2025||
I missed the "Empty Inside?" section. Apologies for that - I'll be more thorough in future articles/comment sections.
8n4vidtmkvmk 7/1/2025|||
Yes, they did.
ar_lan 7/2/2025||
I missed the "Empty Inside?" section. Apologies for that - I'll be more thorough in future articles/comment sections.
HelloMcFly 7/1/2025||
That's in TFA
ar_lan 7/2/2025||
I missed the "Empty Inside?" section. Apologies for that - I'll be more thorough in future articles/comment sections.
eggy 7/1/2025||
Did you account for the paper band that wraps the 100 one-dollar bills? Not nitpicking, but you said you counted everything you could see.

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.

johnfn 7/1/2025|
OP counts the number of bundles, so I don't think this solves it.
tzury 7/1/2025|
In case you wondered, $1M in cash ($100 bills) weigh approximately 22 pounds (about 10 kilograms).

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

hinterlands 7/1/2025|
> In case you wondered, $1M in cash ($100 bills) weigh approximately 15.4 pounds (about 10 kilograms).

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.

actionfromafar 7/1/2025|||
That's perhaps the heftiest clue that it might not be actually 1 million $1 bills. Looks unsafe to perch it like that.
jjk166 7/1/2025||
It's substantially more than 1 million $1 bills.
actionfromafar 7/2/2025||
So more than a metric tonne swiveling like that? Sounds dangerous.
jjk166 7/2/2025||
Not particularly. That whole cube could be supported by a 1/4" diameter steel pin. The actual support almost certainly has a double digit factor of safety.