I look at why the price dropped dramatically in the past and compare that situation to today. Considering all those factors there's no reason to expect silver to drop anytime soon.
-There was no Euro competing against the dollar in the past (and there's no reason to expect the US dollar to ever gain any significant amount on the Euro in the future)
-there is no huge amounts of silver in reserve that governments can just drop onto the market to cause the price to decrease.
- India and China have almost 2.5 billion people and the economies of both countries are just now starting to grow very rapidly, that will contribute to one of the biggest bull markets in commodities in history.
- other commodities like oil can never go down significantly in value like they have in the past, because there is not much left to be mined, same can be said of silver and gold.
- at some point in the dollars rapid drop in value, other currencies like the Euro will inevitably be affected a lot more than they are now.
- the ratio of gold to silver can't get any larger, there is no reason to expect gold to go down in value so silver can only go up. Since it's at almost 20 dollars an ounce now that means it should easily hit 50 dollars before it goes down.