I'd bet on "hollow." Either they overestimated how large the cube would have to be to contain that much, or just decided they wanted a bigger cube than they needed.
The Fed says this is a cube of $1M. They're off by half a million
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Re: The Fed says this is a cube of $1M. They're off by half a million
#52I can't help wondering how big a cube you'd need to fill it with 1 million $1 coins. 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.
Edit: Well, damn. I got about the same as you did and rechecked my math and got it wrong.
Anyway, the weight would be 8.1 metric tons.
https://www.usmint.gov/learn/coins-and-medals/circulating-co...
Re: The Fed says this is a cube of $1M. They're off by half a million
#53counting things are a huge intellectual blind spot. For some reason, when people hear a figure, they accept it as gospel. 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…
Makes you wonder if all those pallets of cash we sent Iran really contained all the money we said it did. Also makes me wonder how you count money that arrives on pallets like that? Do you set up a warehouse full of money counters?
A quick look around says commercially available bill counters count around 1000 bills per minute. Low cost counters have batch sizes of around 200 bills. Larger capacity counters are available.
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).
Re: The Fed says this is a cube of $1M. They're off by half a million
#54Do we truly know if the Middle is all dollar bills and not filler?
Not until Nicolas Cage gets involved.
Re: The Fed says this is a cube of $1M. They're off by half a million
#55> 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:
Re: The Fed says this is a cube of $1M. They're off by half a million
#56It's always amusing how people easily carry $1M cash in the movies.
Re: The Fed says this is a cube of $1M. They're off by half a million
#57Not surprised that the Fed overspent a project by 50%.
I doubt this cost them 1.5M out of their real budget, lol. My guess is these are not legal tender in some way, e.g. worn-out bills that would otherwise be destroyed.
The fact that this is not obvious to everyone is a bit disturbing to be honest..
Re: The Fed says this is a cube of $1M. They're off by half a million
#58[deleted]
Re: The Fed says this is a cube of $1M. They're off by half a million
#59It's always amusing how people easily carry $1M cash in the movies.
well, using larger denominations helps.