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.

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.

You clearly take your currency exhibitions very seriously - although if they're talking instead of sleeping with the fishes then presumably the outcome for the artist isn't as bad as it could've been

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

Not until Nicolas Cage gets involved.

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

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

there's only one way to find out

Hacker News heist plan initiated.

For scientific purposes only obviously.

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

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).