Now, now - I once knew a fellow that claimed his speaker cables produced a vastly superior sound in his stereo system because the wire in them consisted of a “single crystal of silver stretched out so it had reduced internal connection impedance.” They still make this shit and sell them at ~$1700 a 1 meter pair.
So obviously silver is as valuable as can be. If you’re selling snake oil to idiots :p.
Heavy metals make a poor diet when food runs out.
What is the heaviest object one could purchase with silver that would weigh less than the silver used to purchase it? How much silver to pay for, a nuclear submarine, for example?
Or civilization will have collapsed, and* neither *is worth much because there’s very little to buy. Or mineral extraction technology will have advanced letting humanity extract large amounts of trace metals from seawater or whatever, rendering silver and gold into cheap industrial materials. Or owning silver and gold will have been made illegal, rendering it not only worthless but dangerous. Or America will collapse rendering US dollars worthless because everyone uses the Universal World Currency Unit instead.
50 years is much too long to make confident predictions.
The heaviest object worth more than its weight in silver? A gold box full of all the world’s paper currency, of course!
Because gold is worth more than its weight in silver, and so is a dollar bill.
Off-topic:
My own patent-pending process uses genetically-engineered bacteria to glom onto metallic ions in seawater for subsequent extraction. By fine-tuning the protein receptors I can select strains to extract any element I want.
It appears that in every thousand tons of seawater there are about 50 cents worth each of the elements tin, gold, copper, silver. Of course there is also $7000 worth of magnesium (and far more sodium or calcium, relative to the elemental prices quoted at Wikipedia). Rubidium or Boron look like possible good compromise choices (high unit price, high portion of seawater) — what’s the demand for them look like?
The historical average pay for a days worth of labor has been a tenth of an ounce of silver. In the Scriptures it is mentioned that field laborers work all day for a Denarius, which consists of a tenth of an ounce of silver. In Sun Tzu’s Art of War he mentions that war causes huge drains on the resources of the state- a thousand ounces a day for a 100,000 man army- actually less than an ounce per person per day. When this quadrillion dollar+ empire of illusory wealth collapse, it is likely that we will return to the historical norm of 1/10 oz of silver for a days worth of labor. Remember, there’s only about 1/4 to 1/2 oz of silver for every man, woman, and child alive today. And yet, we can buy an ounce for the same cost as a burger, large fries, and large cola at Five Guys. What an opportunity.
We’re living in anomalous times. Our modern way of life is only made possible by 1. An endless supply of cheap, abundant energy (particularly oil) and 2. An endless amount of debt. You think either of those are going to last forever?
When the currencies become not worth the paper they’re printed on, people will want something of actual value in exchange for their gold or silver.
It’s the very definition of liquidity. Silver (and gold) are money. The framers wrote that into the Constitution. Paper currency is nothing more than a claim on or future promise for money. However, we now have a global Fiat currency system. The only difference between any fiat currency and Monopoly play money is that one is deemed by a government to be “legal tender for all debts, public and private” and the other is not. Ultimately, the value of a Fiat currency is dependent on the faith people have in the government that issues it. Let me ask you- are Americans gaining or losing faith in their government?
Because we’re sailing in uncharted waters. Never before had the world been this awash in debt. Never before has there been a global, generational, fiat currency, debt based Ponzi scheme.
Look, silver was here long before man developed any financial systems, and it will be here long after man is gone from this earth. How many other assets can you say that about?
Yes, there have been spikes and dips in the price of silver in dollar terms. But the general trend had been upwards. An ounce of silver had equal or greater purchasing power as it did in the 50s and 60s. Can you say that about fiat dollars?
If you think silver isn’t valuable, consider that modern life as we know it would not be possible without silver.
Silver is among the most useful commodities in the world. If you do not value it, that is fine. But you don’t get to dictate it’s value, the market does.
I’m sorry, but as much as I despise fiat currency, I need to keep some around for bills and taxes and such.
Yes. The market determines its value, because it doesn’t have intrinsic value, and every time you’ve said it has intrinsic value is flat wrong. The fact that you keep saying this flatly wrong thing makes me think it’s part of your argument. It’s not really good when your argument relies on things that are flatly wrong.
It’s a sure fact that silver has been valued at various amounts throughout history. This doesn’t mean that it’s got magical value-producing powers, though. Salt was considered a medium of exchange once; do you consider its value immutable?
Your position seems to rely on silver and gold having inherent powers not shared by any other commodity. Whereas I look at silver and note that it only becomes a medium of exchange when it gets its value normalized as a fiat currency. While it’s part of a necklace it isn’t money, it’s a commodity. So after regular currency fails and zombies roam the earth silver won’t suddenly coalesce into standard universally-accepted coinage. It’ll just stay as necklaces and bars of metal which you’ll have to try and barter with.
Actually, no. That stopped being true when we went off the gold standard. Paper currency is money.
In exactly the same way, nothingness – i.e. the electrons used to transfer money online – is currency and not a claim or future promise for money.
Currency does not need any tangibility of any kind. It is a record, an intermediary, a mathematical system. I can spend the imaginary nothingness in a PayPal account exactly as I can cash or even gold, should someone want to barter that way, except easier and to more places. All currencies are all exactly equivalent. You cannot convince anybody otherwise. You can’t even fool yourself, as you proved your need for fiat currency rather than silver or gold in our real world.
The historical average tells you nothing whatsoever about the rate at any particular point in history, and you live in and need to acquire goods in a particular timespan. No, there is no particular likelihood that it’s going to return to 1/10 oz of silver, because there’s nothing “normative” about an average across centuries of human experience in a variety of economic climates (even assuming your average is accurate).
For example, does the Gospel of Matthew refer to an Augustan denarius of the beginning of the first century (3.9 grams of 95% silver), or a denarius from the time of Nero (3.4g, 93.5%), or perhaps a debased denarius from the latter second century? (None of them contained exactly a 1/10 ounce of pure silver, and even slight changes in weight or fineness skew your averages.)
A thousand ounces of silver per day for a 100,000-man army works out to 1/100 of an ounce each, an order of magnitude less than a tenth ounce. Is that more or less a historical norm than the Roman example, or the Greek example I gave earlier?
Probably not, but what does that have to do with the price of silver?
When the currencies are not worth the paper they’re printed on, it will be because people have lost faith in the ability of their government to maintain a stable society. If that happens, necessities of life (food, shelter, etc.) are things of actual value.
Liquidity refers to the ability to quickly and cleanly exchange goods and services. There’s nothing inherently magical about silver (or gold) that makes it liquid; they are liquid in the market only to the extent that people trust them to retain value and be accepted everywhere. Right now, US paper dollars are highly liquid (they’re accepted across the entire country and much of the world) and they are fairly stable. Silver is a lot harder to turn into foodstuffs because most American grocers won’t accept it, so you have to find a middleman who will turn it into dollars for you (meanwhile taking his cut), AND the price of silver has been much more volatile in recent decades than the US dollar, so as a store of value silver isn’t so hot. Right now, the dollar is more liquid than silver.
Will that always be the case? Perhaps not. Many Americans don’t trust our government to always do the right thing, but that’s very different from trusting our government to maintain social order. It takes some pretty fringe thinking to expect the United States is going to descend to the level of Venezuela or Zimbabwe in the next six months or a year (and both of those countries took much longer than a year to fall as far as they have).
Yes, ultimately the value of a fiat currency is dependent on the faith people have in the government and society; ultimately, the value of silver is dependent on the faith people have that this pretty metal will retain value. Note that both are based on faith.
Never before has the world enjoyed the level of prosperity it does today. Never before have humans lived as long, on average, as they do today. Never before have there been as many humans as there are today. As a species, we’re pretty much always in uncharted waters, and this isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Granite and cockroaches were both here long before and will be here long after man (and the former, at least, is economically useful). What intrinsic value does that confer upon them?
The general trend has not been upward; it’s been all over the place, rising and falling with the general economy, with silver supply (the Comstock Lode, e.g., or Mexican silver in the 16th century), with market manipulations (the Hunt brothers), the interests of speculators, predictions of future economic results, etc., etc., etc. An ounce of silver today has greater purchasing power than it did in the 1950s, and less than it did in the late 1970s, and less than it did in 1819 or in ancient Greece.
For example, two hundred years ago you could buy a cow in Maryland or Virginia for around $10-12 in silver dollars (approximate 240-300 grams of silver). As I write this, here in Kansas you can buy a cow at auction for anywhere from $500 to $1500; at current spot, that’s somewhere between 1000 and 3000 grams of silver. In other words, you have to give between four and ten times as much silver for that cow.
Modern life might well be different, but there is nothing that silver can do for us that cannot be accomplished in other ways with other materials or techniques. Those others might be more expensive or more difficult, but that is not at all the same as impossible.
This is also true of manure.
Marcus Flavius If (note the if) there is a vast shadowy government conspiracy to hide inflation, what group is behind it?
Re The Coming Apocalypse
Without access to my medications and chocolate, I wouldn’t want to survive.
All of you beans and bullets people need to see me when because when the US dollar collapses I’m cornering the toilet paper market.
So just using your math once the collapse occurs we get to work for 5 days before there is no more money? Even assuming a 99% die off there is only 2 years worth of wages available before we run out of silver. It sounds like either there is going to have to be a major extinction event or we’re going to need to use something that is more commonly available. My guess is if we lose 99% of the population there won’t be enough of an economy left to matter. Salt may be used instead of silver since its more needed for life.
Another factor against gold and silver is one of the points that’s offered in supposed support of them; their historical value.
Let’s say I want to invest my money in comic books. I can go out at buy a bunch of comic books at my local store for their cover price (I think they’re around five dollars now). I can hope that in ten years, the now relatively unknown guy who wrote the story or produced the art will be recognized as a giant in the field and his early work will be valuable to collectors. I can then resell my copies of these original comic books for fifty dollars apiece.
That’s not going to happen with gold or silver. I can’t buy gold or silver cheaply because people haven’t discovered its worth yet. Gold and silver are already recognized as valuable commodities and their price reflects that when I buy them.
Most of you are all wet, especially OP. 
I don’t like semantic games — what does “intrinsic worth” even mean? — but if you define such that NOTHING has “intrinsic worth” then, sure, silver doesn’t have intrinsic worth either. Great moments in tautologization!
ALMOST a good point. And the reason it’s only almost correct is the rapidity of change itself. I can predict with some confidence that Justin Bieber will not be a top star in 2070.
The U.S. has a $19 trillion economy with $4 trillion of M1. If your calculus were sensical then M1 would all be gone in 11 weeks. (And, again, arguments about the SCARCITY of precious metals only help support OP — Don’t you guys even see that??)
Between the beans and Saint Cad’s cheap toilet paper, I’m filling my apocalyptic go-to bag with Preparation H!
Saint Cad, what you don’t realize is that when the apocalypse goes down and silver reigns supreme, we will all of us have become investors in a sort of crude toilet paper: our very own fiat currency!
The problem with a “fort” it that it permanently puts you on defense. Sure you can send out patrols, but ultimately you are a sitting duck. You might be able to hold off 30 or 40 well armed marauders for awhile, but word of your well stocked compound will sooner or later spread and attract the attention of larger and larger groups until you are over run and/ or the compound is destroyed.
I’m going with 1, an infinitesimal probability.
A real currency collapse is going to cause utter and widespread chaos. Given the difficulty of successfully protecting oneself against it, and the low likelihood of occurrence, I’m not doing anything to prepare for it. It would be like bringing a parachute onto a commercial plane flight.
Not sure why OP thinks that there is any medium of exchange that will never lose purchasing value.