A homeowner in Denmark digging in his backyard uncovered more than 40 pounds of silver roughly 1,000 years old — a discovery that sharply contrasts the enduring value of precious metals with paper currency, which history shows can rot, mold, or be eaten by rodents when stashed away.

Viking Silver

The silver hoard discovered in Denmark consisted of around 700 objects from the Viking era, including bars, coins, and jewelry. Despite having been buried for approximately 1,000 years, the items are in remarkably good condition.

Hoards like this were a standard way of storing wealth in the Viking Age, an era without banks or vaults. Silver was the dominant monetary metal across Scandinavia, weighed on balance scales for transactions rather than counted as standardized coins — which is why hacksilver fragments appear alongside intact bars and jewelry in such finds.

According to Live Science, all of the silver bars, along with some of the bracelets and silver fragments, can be sorted into specific weight groups. This indicates the collection represented an "important storage of wealth," not merely a random assortment of silver objects.

"The treasure so clearly shows how silver functioned as wealth and a means of payment in the Viking Age. It's like finding a safe from the Viking Age," said Torben Sarauw, cultural heritage manager at North Jutland Museums.

Under Danish law, archaeological finds such as this belong to the state, and finders and landowners are typically compensated with a reward reflecting the value of the discovery.

Notably, a millennium later, that wealth still exists and is worth every bit as much as it was in its day.

Based on the purity of comparable Viking-era Danish silver (around 94 percent), the 18.5-kilogram hoard contains roughly 559 troy ounces of pure silver. At the current spot price, the melt value exceeds $37,000.

That raises a question worth pondering: what would happen to $37,000 in U.S. paper currency buried in the ground for 1,000 years? Would it still be worth $37,000?

The answer is fairly well established, because people have tried it. Paper buried in the ground or stuffed into walls simply does not hold up.

Billion-Dollar Rat Food

In the late 1980s and early '90s, Pablo Escobar was one of the richest men in the world. Forbes placed him on its list of international billionaires for seven straight years, from 1987 to 1993. Escobar made his billions through drug trafficking — at his peak, his Medellín cartel supplied around 80 percent of the world's cocaine.

Roberto Escobar, Pablo's accountant, wrote in his autobiography that the cartel brought in cash faster than it could be laundered. Cartel members resorted to stashing currency in dilapidated warehouses, farm fields, and inside the walls of their homes. Roberto said the cartel wrote off $2.1 billion per month in lost or destroyed cash.

"Pablo was earning so much that each year we would write off 10 percent of the money because the rats would eat it in storage or it would be damaged by water or lost," Roberto said. Rats, it should be noted, do not eat silver or gold.

Pablo's nephew, Nicholas Escobar, confirmed the account, saying he once found $18 million in cash stuffed inside the walls of an apartment formerly used by the cartel. Many of the banknotes were damaged and unusable.

"The smell was astonishing. A smell 100 times worse than something that had died," Nicholas said. Silver and gold, by contrast, do not stink when left inside a wall.

Rodents were not the only force eating away at Pablo's fortune. Politicians in Washington, D.C., were also eroding his wealth through relentless currency debasement. For the sake of argument, suppose Pablo sealed $37,000 in cash inside a wall in 1990. If someone found that stash today, it would buy only about $14,117 worth of goods — a decline in purchasing power of nearly 62 percent in less than 40 years. That assumes the rats did not get to it first.

The Durability Test

One of Aristotle's four characteristics of good money is durability. Money must stand the test of time — it cannot easily break down, rot, or corrode. And it probably should not be edible by rats.

Silver's monetary track record spans millennia for exactly this reason. The United States minted silver in its everyday coinage until 1965, when rising metal prices pushed dime and quarter production to copper-nickel clad substitutes — a modern illustration of the same debasement pressures the article's comparison invokes.

Paper fiat dollars fail this test. Viking silver, on the other hand…