Gah! History always disappoints me. As the historian Dennis Flynn put it, a significant hunk of the GDP of China, then the world's biggest economy, was surrendered in order to secure a white metal that was produced mostly in Spanish America and Japan. Think about what else those resources could have been used for. The Spanish Empire's silver trade was the first truly global market. Even India was involved, but we're really out of time. And its consequences were dire, even if it did make some people rich.