For most of recorded history money meant silver. Gold was too valuable for ordinary transactions and copper too bulky; silver sat at the useful middle, and the great majority of coinage from the Lydian and Greek issues onward was struck in it.
The traces are in the language. The pound sterling began as a weight of silver. The French argent and the Spanish plata mean both the metal and money outright. The shekel and the drachma were weights of silver before they were coins.
Athenian power in the fifth century BCE rested substantially on the silver mines at Laurion, which paid for the fleet that fought at Salamis. Roman denarii were silver, and their progressive debasement through the third century CE is one of the clearest quantitative records of imperial finance available to historians.
The largest single event in the history of the metal was the discovery in 1545 of the mountain of silver at Potosi, in what is now Bolivia, together with the Mexican mines. The quantities were unprecedented. The ore was extracted by forced labour under conditions that killed on a very large scale, and the mercury amalgamation process used to refine it poisoned both workers and land. That silver flowed to Europe and, in enormous volume, onward to China, which had put its tax system on a silver basis. The resulting inflation across Europe, and the binding together of the Chinese and European economies through a single metal, is one of the foundations of the modern world economy.
Silver's monetary role ended during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as states moved first to gold and then to fiat currency. The United States demonetised silver in 1873, an act its opponents called the Crime of '73, and the argument over silver coinage dominated American politics for a generation afterwards.