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78 sats \ 0 replies \ @spiderman 23h \ parent \ on: I sold over $10k (CAD) worth of Gold and Silver at a Pawn Shop econ
All those ratios were set by the governments themselves, but traded on the market, they regularly diverged from the legally mandated ratio depending on demand-supply.
In old enough times, silver was not too bad as money, for relatively low value transactions. I mean, you would carry gold to buy a house, but carry a silver brick to buy a goat.
Of course, as we moved to the banking era, people stopped actually carrying physical metals, replacing them with IOU notes issued by...first banks, then the government. Hence, silver lost its monetary usage as the pain-point of carrying out low value transactions was solved by fractional IOUs on gold.
Hence, most of the silver kept in vaults found their way to the market for industrial usage, part of the price that was inflated by the hoarding of the material was deflated.
So it is somewhere between copper and gold now, in terms of industrial usage and store-of-value, but in terms of the later, it diminished a lot in past century or so. It will never reach the previous high (in terms of ratio against gold), but given its crazy importance industrially, after reaching a bottom it would keep pace with (or beat) inflation very well.