Gold and silver are stores of energy.
It takes vast amounts of time and some might argue luck to find gold and silver sites. Silver is mostly a byproduct of base metals (zinc, copper, lead) so as base metal miners continue to struggle financially, silver will continue to decline as it is both a precious metal and industry metal with many uses as you can read about here:
https://www.bullionvault.com/gold-news/infographics/21-incredible-uses-for-silver