The end of silver as a precious metal?

SpacePete

SpacePete

Well-Known Member
Silver Stacker
Has there been any conjecture that silver could go the way of aluminium, or other once valuable elements, and lose its status as a precious metal?

While it may be prima facie true that this will never be the case in the foreseeable future given ore concentrations, extraction costs and demand factors, I am just curious as to wether there had been any serious attempts to argue that our fundamental assumptions on silver are wrong?

I have so far had no luck googling for anyone putting forward this idea.
 
SilverPete said:
Has there been any conjecture that silver could go the way of aluminium, or other once valuable elements, and lose its status as a precious metal?

While it may be prima facie true that this will never be the case in the foreseeable future given ore concentrations, extraction costs and demand factors, I am just curious as to wether there had been any serious attempts to argue that our fundamental assumptions on silver are wrong?

I have so far had no luck googling for anyone putting forward this idea.
Click to expand...

When I google your question I find this post, so it is a self fulfilling prophecy. YOU MADE IT HAPPEN!

And you used wether in lieu of whether, so it will happen during the year of the goat and we'll all be financially castrated.

We don't want your kind around here.
 
sammysilver said:
When I google your question I find this post, so it is a self fulfilling prophecy. YOU MADE IT HAPPEN!

And you used wether in lieu of whether, so it will happen during the year of the goat and we'll all be financially castrated.

We don't want your kind around here.
Click to expand...

Dammit, financial Armageddon is upon us. My bad.

This is like being embarrassed by a modern day Cardinal Richelieu: "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of forum commenters, I will find something in them referencing goat testicles".

I am not a clever man.

a4CVG.jpg
 
Well history is littered with great stores of wealth that are now worthless.

Look at plastic shopping bags.

Once you had to pay for them, and you looked after them, reusing them time and time again and you didn't throw them out unless you had to. Then they started giving them away for free. Most people took this as a sign that plastic shopping bags were now worthless and drained their stack, using them as bin liners and not bothering to take them back to the shops.

Some people didn't get the message.

You would see homeless people collecting the plastic bags that had been discarded, they would have bags full of plastic bags, because up until recently bags had been worth money and they thought they were storing some wealth.

I sometimes feel that this is the way that silver might go.

The people in the know would come to the conclusion that silver was no longer that important, they would offload their stacks, other materials would be used instead.

The price of silver would drop and the people who were not in the know would be fighting over the remaining supply buying as much of it as they could because they remember when silver was worth lots of money.

We will soon see stackers pushing shopping trolleys full of silver around abandoned car parks.

Same thing with mouse mats! They were everywhere, reps gave them away for adverstising, you had liquid filled ones with glitter in them and some had wrist rests and some were neoprene with tourist scenes on them. Where are they now? Technology replaced the need for them, factories employing workers to produce these things had to switch to something else or close down. In a matter of a few years mouse mats went from being an essential item to being worthless.

I don't think many people stacked mousemats, well...

couch1.jpg

Source: http://people.rit.edu/jpsdss/couch/
 
Jislizard said:
We will soon see stackers pushing shopping trolleys full of silver around abandoned car parks.
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Silver shopping trolleys. You heard it here first!
 
Anybody offloading their so called worthless silver? I want first dibs!
 
Fat Freddy said:
I've been stacking plastic shopping bags for many years. MY DAY WILL COME!
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The modern ones just rot, even out of the light. You might want to check your stack - it may be no more than a pile of plastic dust.

I'm sure there's a biblical quote appropriate to this thread, something about not piling up treasure where moth and corrosion will get them, but rather ..........
 
The Crow said:
Fat Freddy said:
I've been stacking plastic shopping bags for many years. MY DAY WILL COME!
Click to expand...
The modern ones just rot, even out of the light. You might want to check your stack - it may be no more than a pile of plastic dust.

I'm sure there's a biblical quote appropriate to this thread, something about not piling up treasure where moth and corrosion will get them, but rather ..........
Click to expand...


tumblr_lrqaz8AxDh1qdhf83.gif
 
I only stack the good ones. Mine are all intact. I have a lot of special issue commemoratives, too. I anticipate their developing significant bagismatic value well beyond mere bagullion value.
 
Altima said:
Anybody offloading their so called worthless silver? I want first dibs!
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Have you got your shopping trolley at the ready?

Sadly you are on the wrong forum for that, we are the people who will be getting all excited and buying all the way down to $0.

You need to be on one of the other forums, probably ones that are technology lead, they will be the people who find out how to make solar panels without silver or antibiotics that don't rely on some vague antibacterial properties.

Imagine being on the photography forums when digital photography came out, that must have been a bit shocking for some! Imagine all that equipment that we used to have in the darkroom, carefully packed away in case we needed it again, gathering dust, too old to be usedful, too young to be antiques, too common to be collectable. Worth a fortune at the time, replaced by a free computer program.
 
Fat Freddy said:
I only stack the good ones. Mine are all intact. I have a lot of special issue commemoratives, too. I anticipate their developing significant bagismatic value well beyond mere bagullion value.
Click to expand...

OMG!!!! is this you!?

http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com.au/world-records/dedication/largest-collection-of-sick-bags

I have a few Harrod's bags from London, they must have been sick of people coming in off the street, walking around for a few hours and then buying the cheapest item just to get a disposable shopping bag, or maybe not, they sold a lot of shortbread biscuits to tourists.

Beware of the bags that the councils give out for free to pick up dog litter. They are biodegradeable and will slowly crumble, which is a good indicator not to use them, but if they are just on the turn, well you wouldn't want to be picking up anything with them when they give out.
 
Jislizard said:
Altima said:
Anybody offloading their so called worthless silver? I want first dibs!
Click to expand...

Have you got your shopping trolley at the ready?

Sadly you are on the wrong forum for that, we are the people who will be getting all excited and buying all the way down to $0.

You need to be on one of the other forums, probably ones that are technology lead, they will be the people who find out how to make solar panels without silver or antibiotics that don't rely on some vague antibacterial properties.

Imagine being on the photography forums when digital photography came out, that must have been a bit shocking for some! Imagine all that equipment that we used to have in the darkroom, carefully packed away in case we needed it again, gathering dust, too old to be usedful, too young to be antiques, too common to be collectable. Worth a fortune at the time, replaced by a free computer program.
Click to expand...

Good post. Most of us here, even those who are bearish, still see silver as maintaining its status as "precious", and even the most contrarian will argue that the floor will be $18, or $15 or something that range. We tend to focus on stories that validate our beliefs and it is difficult to look beyond that. Those with a vested interest in the status quo will often ignore impending shifts in the environment, dismissing them as frivolous, joking about it... and then are taken by surprise when something disruptive rolls over them.

The really hard bit is understanding in advance what is truly a risk to established beliefs and investments, and what is simply B.S.
 
SilverPete said:
Has there been any conjecture that silver could go the way of aluminium, or other once valuable elements, and lose its status as a precious metal?
Click to expand...
And a reason why I asked this is because I have seen no discussion at all on the possibility of disruptive change destroying the value of silver.

Which leads to two possibilities:

1) it is a ridiculous question

2) it is a distinct possibility and people are keeping silent with plans to profit from it
 
Silver is an element that requires per weight unit the processing of alot more tonnes ore than alot other elements.
What will change this?
 
Pirocco said:
Silver is an element that requires per weight unit the processing of alot more tonnes ore than alot other elements.
What will change this?
Click to expand...

Why should anything change it?

If silver isn't needed then the price might go down, regardless of how much it costs to produce it or how rare it is.

It isn't being used as money, it is being used in industry, and industry evolves, maybe the next stage of that evolution will be to get rid of silver.
 
I have noted at least once here on the SS forum that silver is not indispensable and that much of it's commercial usefulness could be heavily impacted by other cheaper or better materials being developed that have specific properties that are suitable to be used in place of silver at a better price point. Silver has taken a significant hit already in the past decade or so since the digital camera started film barreling down toward obsolescence.

If silver's commercial use became precarious, it wouldn't happen for a long time. But then you still have investor demand and coin and jewelry demand.

The bottom line is, while it's possible in some future time that silver could go the way of aluminum, it won't happen in my children's, children's, children's lifetime I think.



.
 
Cant wait for Bagstackers.com.
I'm sure Kitco can add a Bagullion chart.
How bout EFT for Bagullion...I'm in where do I buy....
 
mmissinglink said:
The bottom line is, while it's possible in some future time that silver could go the way of aluminum, it won't happen in my children's, children's, children's lifetime I think.
Click to expand...


Lets hope so! :)
 
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