You're my kind of crazy 57. Unless some intrepid entrepreneur figures out how to reclaim industrial silver from trash in landfills in a cost effective and environmentally sound manner, industrial silver use is effectively lost silver.
Gold doesn't have this issue. Most gold every mined is still in bullion, coin or jewelry form. There is some lost to industrial use, but not even close to the same scale as with silver.
Should silver ever be remonetized, I think we see a your theory tested and likely proven true.
Agreed with pretty much everything said. Even the thought of how much silver could eventually go would not surprise me all that much.
It doesn't even matter how silver is valued in terms of sentiment or common usage. The beauty of the value is not in how a commodity performs while everyone is tossing it about in the air, inflating, speculating and madly trading based on all the nebulous relativities of papered supplies and equally papered demands. For every one that is offering physical goods for sale, there are ten more offering "another way to buy and own it". Idiots. Have we learned nothing about multiple paper claims to the same physical unit of a commodity, and why it is never wise to trust in paper?
Funny how value is determined through its relative 'known' scarcity, and how every paper claim gets counted as if it was in fact real. Just ignore all the hard numbers and facts that guarantee otherwise, and go by the market numbers instead, and somehow that says something. If I went by what is happening in the market, I would have to conclude that silver exists in amazing abundance, especially in light of the absolutely unprecedented number of people on Earth staking equal claims - and yet it price is still within everybody's reach.
It's the same reason currencies stay strong, even while banks get away with multiplying all the claims on the same physical money for so long - and only because the real scarcity simply isn't known. Once the real scarcity is revealed, however, it gets tested with a run. Everyone desperately demands immediate possession, as every paper bluff is called, and all possessions are sorted out. Once that happens, and a much better feel of the true scarcity is revealed, the value adjusts accordingly.
It's funny, I could have played a game and did some profit-taking when silver went close to $50, and then bought yet more when it went back to $30. I knew it would play out the way it did, and yet I wasn't even tempted. Not because I didn't want to tempt fate or take an unnecessary risk, or anything along those lines. It's because that is the mindset that got us where we are today, one I don't want any part of.
Silver is not an investment or source of profits or losses to me. It is not even a source of excitement - but only a store of hard-earned wealth, and nothing more - something I feel everyone should be able to take, ho-hum, for granted as a matter of right. Not as "an advantage", but only as a means by which others cannot take advantage.
So even the idea that silver could hit some unimaginable ceiling is something I find disconcerting in a way. I find it more sad than exciting, to be honest - a testament to the shame I think everyone in Congress should feel for what they've done to this nation, that we should feel giddy about what should have been the equivalent of business as usual for everyone.
I also find all the "get rich with precious metals" schemes annoying - irritating even. Especially when companies that know I'm interested want to peddle their "investment strategies", including everything under the sun they see as an "inside tip", like oil or solar or some other such crap that has nothing to do with why I am interested in precious metals...as a foundation we should all be able to take for granted.
