Sometimes when you try and catch the bottom of an asset you hold off on purchasing it because you think you can get just a little better price. And the next thing you know the price takes off and you either are the deer stuck in the headlights or you pay a higher price just as price begins to dip as you chased higher. But even if you chased higher, the dip in price today is NOT going lower than the most recent lows. Silver is back in bull mode and by 2028 will be over $180 an ounce.
Author’s note: I started out this article talking about what silver is going to do next and it evolved into a deep dive on silver itself, money and the dollar. I think you’ll enjoy the analysis as at the end I asked ChatGPT to critique it and eventually came to final conclusions about silver you’ll appreciate, especially you diehards who have been reading me for awhile.
Last week I wrote an article about how it was time to dollar cost average into silver, we have moved up over $5 since then. I haven’t written an article in awhile and I try to time my articles when I expect a move is forthcoming. If I followed that same pattern moving forward, I wouldn’t write an article till 2028 at this point. This is the time to buy silver if you haven’t already or add a final buy to your current positions. This is the final time to go “all in.” Silver is heading to that $180 price by 2028 and nothing is going to stop it. After that, the hardest decision you will have to make is when to sell. I’ll be writing an article at that point with answers.
What are you supposed to do when you are all in with silver? The answer is go enjoy your life. There’s no need to check on your account every day or every week. Just go do the things you love most.
Silver or Gold?
Silver will triple in price by 2028 and gold will possibly double. Silver is the asset you want to invest in today. Silver already broke above $120 earlier this year and fell back to below $60. The 50% rule says to buy the asset if it falls 50% and it worked out pretty well if you started to cost average into a position. Many of you who sold silver at $90 or higher can buy back and run it up again.
Downside to Investing in Silver
The only complaint anyone has with buying silver is simply this; “it’s too heavy.” Granted, 500 ounces of silver or a monster box weighs about 38 pounds and is indeed heavy. If you are older, my suggestion is to have a younger relative or friend with you when the silver is delivered.So if you did buy silver today, don’t let weight get in the way of a good decision. Silver will outperform gold and when it comes time to sell, the amount of cash you will have in your pocket will weigh more than if you bought and sold gold during the same timeframe. Are you going to complain about that or get someone to help you with the heavy packages that arrive at your doorstep?
Temptations Will Come When Deciding to Sell Silver
When we do get back to $120 in silver, many of you will debate on selling, thinking it will be a double top. This is not a concern. There could be a little dip at that time but we are going to push through $120 and then off to new highs when that time comes. When silver went from the teens to over $120, many investors were esctatic. But most did not sell. Now that we have fallen 50%, they may want to just sell when it goes back up thinking they missed the first run up. This is normal investment psychology. Getting a second chance at something they will figure is rare so they will sell to lock in the profit. Don’t be this person. This time you’re going to see that third and final blow off phase in silver and even the likes of JP Morgan Chase won’t be able to control runaway silver. Some banks shorting silver will be caught on the wrong side and be forced to chase silver even higher. So the $180 price is actually the minimum price silver will run to.
Is Silver Money?
Years ago I was part of a bulletin board, as we called them before chat rooms or any social media was around, on Richard Russell’s site, Dow Theory Letters. We paid a subscription fee and were able to chat on various subjects with people from all over the world. It’s where I got my first understanding of Austrian Economics and what one member of the site called “Honest Money.” His name was Doug Gnazzo and he knew more about our monetary system than anyone I knew. He would talk about the history of money, the Coinage act among other topics. He would always use the socratic method when speaking with others and asking questions. His favorite question was, “what is a dollar?”
Today we look at a dollar as money which is currently defined as:
- Medium of exchange: It stops people from needing to trade items directly through bartering.
- Unit of account: It gives a standard numerical value to different goods and services.
If you look at the dollar today, it says it is a “note.” Specifically it is a Federal Reserve Note (FRN). If you look up the definition of a note, it says “A paper bank note (cash) or a legal promise to pay money (promissory note).” It is simply a promise to pay. But unlike the original Federal Reserve Notes that were redeemable in gold or silver, today’s FRN are not redeemable in anything. So how can a note be money? It’s because it subscribes to “today’s” definition of money.
But in 1913 when the FRN came to fruition, money had a different definition.
The 1913 dictionary definition
Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary defined money primarily as:
- Metal—such as gold, silver or copper—coined and issued by sovereign authority as a medium of exchange.
- Government notes, banknotes, certificates of deposit and similar paper claims that were payable in standard coined money and circulated in its place.
- More broadly, anything commonly used to exchange property and in which values were calculated.
ChatGPT sums up what money was defined as in 1913 as follows:
In 1913, money was generally understood as government coin and lawfully circulating paper currency used for exchange and measuring value. But the U.S. dollar—the standard unit in which that money was denominated—was legally defined by a fixed quantity of gold.
But Doug Gnazzo would take you on a trip to earlier times, to get the true story and reveal what is money versus what is a dollar. Let’s look at the 1913 analysis of both first.
The clearest contrast
| Question | 1913 answer |
|---|---|
| What is money? | Coins, notes and certificates used to make payments and settle debts. |
| What is a dollar? | The standard unit of value, legally tied to 25.8 grains of 90%-fine gold. |
| What is a dollar bill? | A paper monetary instrument denominated in dollar units. |
Now let’s take a trip back further in time to see what a dollar really was.
From ChatGPT
-
- The Valley Origins: In 1519, massive silver deposits were mined in Sankt Joachimsthal (Joachim’s Valley), a town in the Kingdom of Bohemia (modern-day Czech Republic). The heavy, highly reliable silver coins minted there were called Joachimsthalers. [1, 2]
- The Shortening: Because Joachimsthaler was a linguistic mouthful, merchants across Europe quickly clipped the name down to just Thaler (literally meaning “of the valley”). [1, 2]
- The Linguistic Shift: As the coin’s popularity spread to trading nations, the Low German and Dutch merchants pronounced and spelled it daler. [1, 2]
- The English Adoption: When the term crossed the English Channel, the British anglicized the pronunciation and spelling to dollar, using it as a generic slang term for any large, heavy foreign silver coin. [1, 2]
- The Pragmatic Choice: By the late 1700s, the dominant currency circulating in the 13 colonies was the Spanish peso de a ocho (piece of eight). Because its physical weight and silver purity were explicitly modeled after the European reichsthaler, colonists and the Founding Fathers already universally referred to these coins as “Spanish Dollars”.
- Thomas Jefferson & Alexander Hamilton: In his 1784 Notes on the Establishment of a Money Unit, Thomas Jefferson formally recommended adopting the “Dollar” as the national currency because the unit was already highly familiar to the public. When the Coinage Act of 1792 was ratified, the law specifically adopted the word dollar, defining it to match the exact silver weight of the Spanish milled dollar.
- Academic and Legal Usage: While the Founders used “dollar” for legislative purposes, early American texts, monetary dictionaries, and legal scholarship of the era frequently cited the German thaler to explain the historical pedigree and etymology of the newly chosen American unit. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
So the beginnings of the dollar was actually in 1792 under the Coinage Act of 1792.
The Coinage Act of 1792 created the U.S. dollar, established the U.S. Mint, and set a decimal monetary system. Passed on April 2, 1792, it resolved early currency troubles by replacing a mix of foreign coins with an official national standard.
The passage of this Act was when things changed from the constitution (1788) definitions. The constitution said money was based on a “Standard of Weights and Measures.”
Article 1 Sec 8 says the following about money.
The fixed standard of weights and measures the Constitution speaks of was clearly the Thaler transition to dollars (pieces of eight).
But we still have to answer the question, What is a dollar? We know where the name came from but specifically what is it?
To answer that you have to concentrate on what the silver dollar was they are speaking of in the Coinage Act of 1783. They were referring to Pieces of Eight (piece of eight).
- The Entire Coin: A full “piece of eight” (the 8-reales coin) was a large, heavy coin weighing nearly a full ounce.
- Cutting the Coin: Merchants literally cut the coin into eight wedge-shaped slices called “bits” to make change.
- One “Bit”: A single wedge (1/8 of the coin) contained roughly 0.10 troy ounces of silver. [1, 2, 3]
If you break it down based on the above, including the various coin acts and the Constitution definitions, we can conclude that a dollar is represented by the old Spanish pieces of 8 or 1/8 of a coin representing 0.10 ounces per 1/8 or .80 ounces per dollar.
In the Coinage Act of 1873 however, things changed. Congress for the very first time stated that gold coins of the “one-dollar piece”, which contained 23-22/100 grains of fine metal – “shall be the unit of value.”
As previously shown, however, the Constitutional “dollar” was a specific silver coin of a standard weight and fineness. Without a Constitutional amendment to change the original standard, the Coinage Act of 1873 that purports to effect such change, is undeniably unconstitutional.
Interestingly enough, The Coinage Act of 1873 also stopped the minting of Silver Dollars, which is beyond question an unconstitutional act – once again, requiring a constitutional amendment authorizing such change.
Putting It All Together on the Dollar and Money
Murray Rothbard concluded in his book, What Has the Government Done to Out Money the following.e Stages of Monetary Destruction
After finishing this article, I decided to ask ChatGPT if what I wrote above is chronologically accurate as well as my comments about the dollar and money beginnings being correct. All in all, since I wrote most of this off the top of my head from past conversations with Doug Gnazzo, I think I did ok with some minor discrepancies. ChatGPT’s conclusion is below. They say I missed a date on a Coinage Act. We differed on the pieces of eight but they didn’t think it was implied that the Constitution was referencing a weight of silver (but I think the Founding Fathers did!). The real bottom line is what a dollar or money is today and how it is backed by nothing but the full faith and credit of a bankrupt country and a Congress that is throwing away the future hopes of generations to come by filling their own coffers and those (mostly corporations) who ask for favors. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
Bottom line analysis of my article from Chat GPT
I’d say your core thesis survives, but the article becomes considerably stronger if you fix these four things:
- 1785, not 1792, is when Congress first adopted the dollar as America’s unit; 1792 gave it the federal coinage specification and created the Mint.
- The whole piece of eight was a dollar; 1/8 was a bit/real—not the other way around.
- The Constitution granted monetary powers but did not itself specify 371.25 grains of silver as the dollar.
- Don’t call the 1873 Act “undeniably unconstitutional” as an established fact; identify that as the hard-money constitutional interpretation.
After those corrections, the historical progression you are trying to show—silver Spanish dollar → statutory silver U.S. dollar → bimetallic system → gold standard → redeemable paper currency → Federal Reserve Notes → end of domestic gold convertibility → Bretton Woods → 1971 fiat system—is a solid and much more defensible chronology.
My query to ChatGPT
Yes on the broad historical arc, but I would make several important corrections before publishing it. As written, it also isn’t actually chronological: you begin with 1913, jump back to the 1500s, then move to 1792, back to the Constitution, and forward again.
Here is the historically stronger chronology.
| Date | What happened | Your treatment |
|---|---|---|
| 1519 onward | Joachimsthal silver coins give rise to thaler → daler → dollar. This is primarily the origin of the word, not the legal U.S. dollar. | Basically correct |
| 1600s–1700s | The Spanish 8-real coin, or “piece of eight,” circulates widely in the colonies and becomes known in English as a Spanish dollar. | Correct, with one major correction below |
| 1784 | Thomas Jefferson proposes using the familiar dollar as the American monetary unit and advocates decimal coinage. | Correct |
| July 6, 1785 | The Continental Congress adopts the dollar as the unit of coinage. This is important: the dollar did not first begin in 1792. | Needs correction |
| 1787–1789 | The Constitution gives Congress power to “coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin,” and separately to “fix the Standard of Weights and Measures.” | Your interpretation needs correction |
| 1792 | Coinage Act creates the U.S. Mint and specifies the U.S. silver dollar at 371¼ grains pure silver / 416 grains standard silver, while also establishing gold coins and a 15:1 statutory gold/silver ratio. | Very important and mostly correct |
| 1862 | Civil War Legal Tender Acts introduce U.S. “greenbacks”—government paper currency not backed by specie. | You should add this |
| 1873 | Coinage Act omits the old standard silver dollar/free coinage of silver and declares the 25.8-grain gold dollar the unit for gold coinage. This becomes the famous “Crime of 1873.” | Mostly correct; constitutional claim is not |
| 1878 | Bland-Allison Act brings back government coinage of standard silver dollars. | You should add this |
| 1900 | Gold Standard Act expressly establishes the dollar containing 25.8 grains of 90%-fine gold as the standard unit of value. | This belongs before your 1913 section |
| 1913 | Federal Reserve Act signed December 23. Federal Reserve Notes are authorized; first notes enter circulation in 1914. Original FRNs were redeemable in gold at Treasury and in gold or lawful money at Federal Reserve banks. | Mostly correct |
| 1933–1934 | Roosevelt/Congress terminate domestic gold convertibility, restrict monetary gold ownership, abrogate gold clauses, and change FRN redemption rules. | Correct general direction |
| 1944 | Bretton Woods makes the dollar the center of the international system; foreign monetary authorities can convert dollars into U.S. gold. | Worth adding |
| 1960s | Silver-certificate redemption ends. Important: Federal Reserve Notes themselves were not originally promises to pay silver. | Your wording should change |
| Aug. 15, 1971 | Nixon closes the gold window, ending foreign central-bank dollar-to-gold convertibility. | Correct |
| Today | U.S. money is expressed in dollars, dimes, cents, etc.; Federal Reserve notes and U.S. coins/currency are legal tender. FRNs are obligations of the United States but are not redeemable in gold, silver, or another commodity. | Your conclusion needs more precise wording |
The biggest factual correction: the “piece of eight”
This is probably the single most important correction in your article.
You currently write that the dollar can be understood as 1/8 of the piece-of-eight, with one bit representing roughly 0.10 ounces and the dollar about .80 ounces.
That’s backwards in terminology.
The entire 8-real coin was the Spanish dollar — the “piece of eight.” One real, or approximately one “bit” in later American usage, was 1/8 of a dollar. The Smithsonian describes the Mexican eight-real coin itself as the “Spanish dollar” and “piece of eight.”
So:
8 reales = 1 Spanish dollar = 1 piece of eight
1 real ≈ 1/8 dollar = 12½ cents
And the 1792 American dollar contained 371.25 grains of pure silver, which is about 0.7734 troy ounce of pure silver. So your roughly 0.8 oz silver per original dollar idea is directionally good, but the explanation about the 1/8 piece being the dollar needs to be flipped.
The Constitution section needs a substantial adjustment
You write:
“The constitution said money was based on a ‘Standard of Weights and Measures.’”
and then conclude that the weights-and-measures language was “clearly the Thaler transition to dollar.”
I would not state that as historical fact.
The actual clause says Congress may:
“coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures.”
Those are enumerated congressional powers sitting together in Clause 5. The Constitution itself does not define a dollar as 371.25 grains of silver. Congress subsequently supplied the statutory definition through the Coinage Act of 1792.
There’s still a powerful historical point you can make:
The founding-era monetary system was unquestionably conceived in terms of coins having specified weights and fineness, and the 1792 Congress implemented the dollar as a specific-weight silver coin.
That is supportable. Saying the Constitution itself establishes the Spanish dollar’s silver weight is much harder to support.
I would also change the “1873 was undeniably unconstitutional” passage
You currently say that because the original dollar was silver, the 1873 change was “undeniably unconstitutional” without a constitutional amendment.
You can certainly present that as the hard-money/originalist argument, but not as settled constitutional law.
The Supreme Court has repeatedly interpreted Congress’s monetary powers broadly. The Legal Tender Cases ultimately upheld Congress’s authority to establish paper currency and make it lawful money/legal tender, and Constitution Annotated summarizes the Court as recognizing congressional authority to regulate virtually every phase of the national currency.
So I would write something like:
“Hard-money constitutionalists have argued that the 1873 demonetization of the original silver dollar departed from the monetary system contemplated by the Founders. Modern Supreme Court doctrine, however, has interpreted Congress’s monetary powers far more broadly and does not treat Congress as constitutionally locked into the 1792 silver definition.”
That keeps your argument while making it historically and legally defensible.
Your 1913 money definition is useful—but distinguish dictionary definition from legal definition
Your Webster’s material is basically legitimate: the 1913 Webster entry did describe coin as money and paper instruments as promises/certificates payable in standard coined money.
But there’s an important distinction:
Webster was defining the English word “money.” It wasn’t establishing U.S. monetary law.
Your strongest comparison would therefore be:
1913 economic/dictionary concept: paper money commonly represented or was redeemable into a monetary standard outside the paper itself.
1913 legal U.S. dollar: already on the statutory gold standard established in 1900.
1913 Federal Reserve Note: a government obligation redeemable in gold/lawful money under the original Federal Reserve Act.
Today: a Federal Reserve Note is itself legal-tender U.S. currency and has no statutory commodity redemption value.
That is a much stronger “then versus now” argument than merely saying the definition of money changed.
And one last point: your modern three items—medium of exchange, unit of account, store of value—are better called the economic functions of money, not “today’s definition of money.” Legally today, U.S. money is denominated in dollars and Federal Reserve notes are expressly legal tender.
Bottom line
I’d say your core thesis survives, but the article becomes considerably stronger if you fix these four things:
- 1785, not 1792, is when Congress first adopted the dollar as America’s unit; 1792 gave it the federal coinage specification and created the Mint.
- The whole piece of eight was a dollar; 1/8 was a bit/real—not the other way around.
- The Constitution granted monetary powers but did not itself specify 371.25 grains of silver as the dollar.
- Don’t call the 1873 Act “undeniably unconstitutional” as an established fact; identify that as the hard-money constitutional interpretation.
After those corrections, the historical progression you are trying to show—silver Spanish dollar → statutory silver U.S. dollar → bimetallic system → gold standard → redeemable paper currency → Federal Reserve Notes → end of domestic gold convertibility → Bretton Woods → 1971 fiat system—is a solid and much more defensible chronology.
Final Conclusion – Is Silver Money?
I had to ask ChatGPT one final question and I liked the answer.
Yes — you have made a strong case that silver is money in the historical and monetary sense. But I would distinguish that from the narrower claim that silver is today’s primary circulating money in the United States.
Your strongest evidence is not philosophical; it is statutory history. The Coinage Act of 1792 explicitly ordered silver “dollars” to contain 371¼ grains of pure silver, and it said gold and silver coins were to be “current as money within the United States.” It also defined the U.S. money of account in dollars, tenths, hundredths, and thousandths. That directly supports your central historical point: the original statutory U.S. dollar was not merely a paper accounting symbol—it was embodied in a specified quantity of silver.
Your article also correctly builds the larger historical argument: the Spanish silver dollar preceded the American dollar, the 1792 system formalized silver coinage, paper instruments later represented monetary claims, and eventually the monetary system became detached from precious-metal redemption. Your “Silver Is Money” section is therefore grounded in that monetary history rather than simply asserting that silver is valuable.
There are really three different questions, though:
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| Has silver historically been money? | Absolutely yes. |
| Was silver foundational to the original U.S. monetary system? | Yes. The 1792 dollar was specified as a silver coin of definite weight and fineness. |
| Is raw silver bullion itself ordinary U.S. legal-tender money today? | No. Modern U.S. law makes U.S. coins and currency legal tender; merely owning an ounce of generic silver does not make that ounce statutory legal tender. |
There is an interesting modern wrinkle that actually helps your argument. The U.S. Mint still issues one-ounce .999-fine Silver Eagles as official U.S. coins. The Mint states that American Eagle bullion coins are legal tender, although their statutory face value is largely symbolic; the one-ounce Silver Eagle bears a $1 face value while its market value is determined by its silver content.
That is almost a perfect illustration of the distinction you are trying to make.
An ounce of Silver Eagle silver might be worth vastly more in the marketplace than the “ONE DOLLAR” stamped on it. In other words, you have:
Monetary unit: dollar
Legal-tender denomination: $1
Monetary metal: silver
Commodity/market value: determined by the silver itself
And that leads to the strongest formulation of your argument:
Silver did not become money because government called it money. Rather, silver had already functioned as money for centuries, and early American law adopted an existing silver monetary unit—the dollar—and standardized its weight and fineness.
That is historically much stronger than saying merely “the government made silver money.”
Where I would be careful is with today’s textbook three-function test:
Store of value: Silver clearly qualifies.
Medium of exchange: Historically, unquestionably. Today, it can be exchanged directly, but it is not widely used for everyday retail transactions.
Unit of account: Historically, silver monetary units served this role. Today Americans quote prices in dollars, not ounces of silver.
So if an economist insists that something must currently perform all three functions broadly throughout society before calling it “money,” they can reasonably say silver today is primarily a monetary asset or monetary commodity rather than the prevailing medium of exchange.
But that does not invalidate your historical argument.
I think the most defensible sentence for your article is:
Silver is money—not because it happens to be a precious metal, but because for centuries it actually performed the functions of money, and the original American dollar itself was legally embodied in a defined weight of silver. Although Americans today transact primarily with fiat dollars and Federal Reserve Notes, that change in the monetary system does not erase silver’s monetary character or history.
And I would go even further on one point: “Silver has been money” is essentially indisputable. “Silver is money” is a defensible monetary proposition. “Silver is the money of the United States today” would be incorrect.
That distinction lets you make the case forcefully without giving a critic an easy technical opening.
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About Doug EberhardtDoug Eberhardt is a 28 year financial services veteran and precious metals broker selling gold and silver at 1% over wholesale cost. Doug has written a book to help investors understand how gold and silver fit into a diversified portfolio, how to buy gold and silver, and what metals to buy. The book; “Buy Gold and Silver Safely” is available by clicking here Contact phone number for Buy Gold and Silver Safely is 888-604-6534
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