Comment by jmyeet

I just want to piggyback off this and discuss the scale in terms of the largest most readily accessible bill, the $100 bill. The relevant parts are [1]:

- Height: 66.3mm

- Width: 156mm

- Thickness: 0.0043 inches = 0.11mm

- Weight: 1.0g

So the volume is 1138mm3. You need 15M notes so that's just over 17 cubic meters or approximately 603 cubic feet, which is a cube roughly 2.6 meters (8.5 feet) on each side, weighing in at 15 metric tons or 33,000 pounds. Put another way, that's over half the volume of a standard twenty foot shipping container (~1100 cubic feet).

But let's get it more compact. The current gold price seems to be about $2939 per Troy ounce, which is 31.1035g. You need 510,378 Troy ounces, which is actually heavier at 15.87 metric tons but way more compact. Given a density of 19.32g/cm3 that's 822,000cm3 or 0.822 cubic meters or 29 cubic feet.

Whatever the case, it's a lot less practical to steal.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_one-hundred-doll...