The Fed says this is a cube of $1M. They're off by half a million

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 2

crazysim 7/1/2025|

I wouldn't be surprised if the bills themselves are marked with specimen or something on the non-visible side. Maybe they're also artificially worn bills produced during bringup or testing.

burnt-resistor 7/1/2025||

I agree. The "money" probably has the shape and appearance of money, but isn't legal tender out of concern risk management and theft.

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.

nativeit 7/1/2025||

Someone else had mentioned these were retired dollar bills (aka, otherwise headed to the incinerator) but I don't know the provenance of this information.

tantalor 7/1/2025||

> “Hey so… we’re $550,400 over budget on the million-dollar cube project.”

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.

Scarblac 7/1/2025||

Well, if it contains 1.5 million, it also contains 1 million.

msowers77 7/1/2025||

I think I saw this cube back in the day, or one like it. I worked at a place called Coin Wrap and we handled sorting and wrapping money for banks, and also wrapped the Sacagawea coins when they came out. One of the trucks came through and had to offload this large cube of money they told us contained 1 million in dollar bills, so they could offload the pallets of coins behind it. I've told people about it but had not seen a picture or knew it was in the Chicago Fed building.

giancarlostoro 7/1/2025||

Do we truly know if the Middle is all dollar bills and not filler?

mh- 7/1/2025||

This felt like the most obvious explanation to me as well. Maybe the artist's vision for it was a solid cube of cash, but it ended up needing a structure inside to support the thing.

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.

delfinom 7/1/2025|||

Artist should have been fired. If I'm being shown a stack of $1 million, it better be a stack of 1 million of they are gonna be talking with the fishes.

giancarlostoro 7/1/2025|||

Agree, I loved the post, but I also wonder if there's more nuance to it that we're unaware of.

jihadjihad 7/1/2025|||

Not until Nicolas Cage gets involved.

lapetitejort 7/1/2025||

We need to sneak a CT scanner, into the Fed...?

volemo 7/2/2025||

Are there any "external"/"outwards" CT scanners? It'd have to somehow measure reflected radiation, I presume.

c249709 7/1/2025|||

there's only one way to find out

aetherson 7/1/2025||

Hacker News heist plan initiated.

Nextgrid 7/1/2025|||

For scientific purposes only obviously.

volemo 7/2/2025||

We'll count it and give it back. Promise.

m-hodges 7/1/2025||

Did you read the article?

> 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).

Feuilles_Mortes 7/1/2025||

Instead of writing the counting tool he could have used the Multi-Point Tool in ImageJ [1] [2]. I used it just this morning for counting some embryos I collected.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhFNiPsVRoM

[2] https://fiji.sc/

Dilettante_ 7/1/2025||

>I used it just this morning for counting some embryos I collected

"Sentences that flashbang people not in biology"

__float 7/1/2025|||

It sounds like this may have been one of the pieces of software the author intentionally chose not to use:

> There are some clunky old Windows programs, niche scientific tools, and image analysis software that assumes you’re trying to count cells under a microscope...

0cf8612b2e1e 7/1/2025|||

Being a web tool is significantly lower friction. I will definitely look into self hosting a version of this I can use in the future.

adolph 7/1/2025||

Here you go: https://ij.imjoy.io/

volemo 7/2/2025||

I just use Inkscape to place dots on the objects and then select all to see the amount. Beware of off by one error! ;)

jt2190 7/1/2025||

> All I wanted was a way to click on things in a photo and have the number go up.

> 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:

https://www.countthis.ai/

quickthrowman 7/1/2025||

I spend more time counting things than most people. I use the ‘Count’ tool in Bluebeam Revu (an architecture/construction pdf editor) when doing material takeoffs for construction estimating. You need to do a lot more than just count when doing a takeoff, so there really isn’t much use for a counting specific tool in my industry.

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.

gowld 7/1/2025|||

Count Apps:

https://apps.apple.com/us/developer/dynamic-ventures-inc/id9...

nyeah 7/1/2025||

Do they claim it's packed solid all the way through?

ourmandave 7/1/2025||

I assume there's a really big ink bomb in the center.

0cf8612b2e1e 7/1/2025||

I assume that at least 51% of the non visible bill parts have been destroyed. Then you do not care if anyone tries some elaborate heist.

Nextgrid 7/1/2025||

Or if the cube needs to go for maintenance or a rebuild. I very much doubt it's real currency with all the security features and stuff.

c249709 7/1/2025||

not explicitly, but the implication is strong. otherwise the cube would be almost any size

jerf 7/1/2025|||

Just for fun, the maximum sized cube you could make with a single layer of them facing flat and then entirely hollow on the inside would be about 41 meters or so on a side. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=sqrt%28%28area+of+a+uni...

stavros 7/1/2025||

I can't argue with the math, but intuitively that just seems really small? It means that you can lay down 166,000 $1 bills on the floor of a very small flat?

kaffekaka 7/1/2025|||

The square side would be 41 m meaning ~1600 square meters per face, if I read correctly. So quite a large flat.

stavros 7/1/2025||

Oh, the side? That makes sense, I thought 41 sqm.

jerf 7/1/2025||

Sorry, yes, 41m-on-a-side cube, not 41m^2-sided cube. The outermost square-root in the expression takes the area of one side of the cube (which is the area of the dollars, divided by 6 to account for needing to cover the 6 sides of the cube) and pulls it down to the cube's length of one side.

stavros 7/1/2025||

Yeah, you said it correctly, but I'm not a native speaker and brainfarted "41m on a side" into "each side is 41 sqm". I thought "face", rather than "edge".

dogecoinbase 7/1/2025||||

41 meters is the height of a 13-story building.

padjo 7/1/2025|||

A flat with very high ceilings?

Edit: even still 41x41 floorspace is a very large flat.

florbnit 7/1/2025|||

The cube is “almost any size” it’s literally overshooting by 50%

rkagerer 7/1/2025||

I'd like to see this or a similar follow up project memorialized onto a small plaque beside the exhibit.

chairmansteve 7/2/2025|

The KLF burned a million pounds in 1994 (about $3million in today's money)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_Foundation_Burn_a_Million_Qu...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9SzDFGbsFI&pp=0gcJCdgAo7VqN...

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