[JKCalhoun]

Having perhaps only a thin understanding of the Hunt births legacy, I was remembering that as silver was bought up, suddenly formerly unprofitable silver mines were reopened, people who had silver began to sell, etc. Suddenly we came to find there was a lot more silver than the Hunt brothers had cornered and the price crashed.

(But I'll (re)read the history in the Wikipedia link, thank. ;-))

[altruios]

While that was true, that was a negligible effect. Silver mining production stopped because ore purity became (and remains) low. Consider the now times of refiners no longer accepting less that pure silver, sterling, constitutional, 80%, 40% isn't getting refined currently due to a massive backlog (read: demand for silver). Reopening mines (and purifying ore to pure silver) remains unlikely in the near future because of this backlog. The core demand for all this silver currently is AI datacenters. There is also a weird acid shortage that's preventing refining from operating at full capacity too.

Lots of weird things happen with silver right now. Even weirder things when you go digging behind the curtain. Even a simple question about 'how much silver exists' is weirdly obscured (we've consumed {rendered into a state where it would be uneconomical to refine it back to pure silver} a substantial portion of the above ground supply). And with backroom whispers of silver confiscation (to fuel AI-datacenters)... lots of 'boating accidents' are being reported.

The history of silver, and pricing on the market gets muddy and grimy, with a lot of perverse incentives.