For most of recorded history, gold measured years and silver measured days.

A Roman legionnaire earned roughly 300 denarii a year. Each denarius held about four grams of silver. Do the math and one ounce of silver equaled roughly ten days of wages. A full year of labor came out to about thirty ounces.

If true, that means a Roman legionary earned roughly 1–2 ounces of gold per year in economic value.

If all of this holds, then money begins to reveal its intimate relationship with time.

Over long stretches of history, silver repeatedly resolved at a unit of value close to a lunar cycle of human labor—weeks, rations, pay intervals—while gold resolved near a solar cycle: a year of accumulated surplus.

The cadence wasn't pre-planned. It's what the earth and human effort helped put into circulation.

Silver priced life as it was lived. Wages. Food. Rent. Tools.

Gold priced life across time. Savings. Dowries. Tribute. Reserves.

That division endured for a long time because it worked. Silver tracked activity. Gold absorbed surplus.

Fast-forward to now and the logic remains intact…

But with an even weirder twist. 

Silver’s Invisible Retort

Gold still functions as a reserve asset. Central banks hoard it. Nations measure credibility against it.

Silver still sits closer to production and labor—only now it does so from behind the scenes, embedded in power grids, electronics, medicine, and defense systems.

The difference today is the world consumes silver daily while the market has by and large priced it as optional. For much of the past century—especially since 2008—silver traded as though its role were narrowing, while its physical footprint steadily expanded.

Put differently…

Silver’s connection to the lunar cycles of human labor faded from market reasoning as industrial demand broadened and monetary demand remained intact on the edges.

History treats gaps like this as temporary conditions, not steady states. And right now, that breach is showing signs of shrinking.

Silver lagged because the modern system pushed settlement far away from daily economic activity. But as labor, production, and settlement begin to reconnect (atoms > bits), silver doesn’t need a narrative.

Instead, it seeks a buyer large enough to pull it back toward settlement.

That brings us to stablecoins.

The Moon Metal’s Dark Horse

Stablecoins evolve like any system. And evolution rewards flexibility.

As Tether grew from a tiny obscure fledgling to a global powerhouse, scale introduced concentration risk. Simple dollar backing grew into balance-sheet management.

Survival demanded diversification.

Gold is a big part of that. In less than five years, Tether has become one of the largest gold holders in the world and tokenized it successfully through its XAUT.

Once that machinery exists, the next step—silver—goes from being exotic to adjacent. And, right now, the incentives line up in its favor.

Silver’s market is small relative to gold’s. Inventories are skinnier. Supply responds more sluggishly. In silver, a price-insensitive buyer is like a meteorite: it creates impact on entry.

For Tether, that sensitivity is a feature. Even a modest diversification into silver would represent a meaningful share of available supply.

The play in three acts:

• Stablecoin issuer seeks diversification.
• Metals already occupy the balance sheet.
• Silver offers leverage.

One prediction (of five) I’ll offer for the new year: silver continues to break containment. And the dark horse lives on stablecoin balance sheets: Tether. (More predictions later.)

Crypto Blasphemy

A Roman legionnaire didn’t think about monetary systems.

He worked. He got paid. That pay showed up as silver. He used it to live. Food. Rent. Supplies. Daily costs.

Gold played a different role. He rarely touched it. It wasn’t for buying dinner. It was for settling something big. Leaving service. Passing wealth forward. Settling debts. Starting over somewhere else.

That division was practical. Silver handled life as it happened. Gold resolved life across time.

The same pattern is resurfacing now.

When settlement speeds up and production tightens, money both reinvents itself and remembers its old assignments.

At the risk of upsetting metal bugs and crypto bugs alike…

Far from a betrayal of cybercapital, crypto’s migration toward metals is a sign of its maturation. Especially as its digital rails begin to revive the same temporal cycles metals once carried.

Historically, silver tends to outperform gold in the later stages of precious metals cycles.

Today’s cycle carries deep structural drivers. Industrial need. Financialization through digital rails. Inventory strain. Monetary re-anchoring.

Silver’s recent surge may be the wheels turning before the load arrives. A pullback would be healthy (and welcome).

But the deeper trend? Silver is resuming its old role—showing up where work and production concentrate. And the market is beginning to mark it in moons, not quarters.