The science behind silver
Although hardly as rare as the other noble metals, silver is nevertheless unique in several key respects. It is the most reflective off all metals, the best conductor of electricity and holds the highest electrostatic charge. Separately and together, these qualities result in silver having a wide and growing array of industrial and even medical uses, some of which render the silver used effectively unrecoverable for any reasonable cost. This distinguishes silver from gold and the PGMs, which normally can be easily and cheaply recovered and recycled if desired. This implies that the supply and demand dynamics of silver differ greatly from the other noble metals. Also, with a far lower value density than either gold or PGMs, silver carries substantially higher storage costs. Taken together, all the above factors make silver a more speculative form of alternative money today, notwithstanding silver's strong monetary traditions across cultures and time. Indeed, a simple count of historical records of silver's monetary use throughout history dwarfs the use of gold and PGMs.
Silver's existing and potential future medical applications, while reaching into multiple directions, so far are concentrated primarily in the antisceptic, antibacterial, antiviral and anticarcinogenic areas. Silver's ability to disrupt, disable or at least slow a number of otherwise hard to treat micropathological processes--bacterial, viral, antioxidant and carcinogenic--turn silver into a general disease fighting bullet, either on its own or, more commonly, combined with man-made drugs to 'turbo-' or 'supercharge' the effects. While much is still untested or unproven, so far silver is proving by far the most medically useful of the noble metals in all areas.