I wouldn't buy on Ebay. Some fake stuff on there. Only buy from a direct dealer that gets their bullion from the major mints. SD Bullion, APMEX, and JM Bullion are very safe. I haven't used them but Miles Franklin is very reputable but you have to call direct to order. They had some silver Britannia coins a couple of days ago but most likely out by now. It is really too late to jump on now. In these situations you have to be buying when nobody is talking about silver. As you are seeing, buying at any price is almost impossible now because the supply is gone.

Well if you already own it then you aren't really making much of a difference to this silver short scenario--I'm not saying that's a bad thing but it's not going to add any extra pressure to them.

If your goal is to store value in the form of the bit of silver that you currently own then it's better than nothing, although it's probably sterling silver which is 92.5% silver and 7.5% copper, the silver that most people buy is .999 parts out of 1000 pure silver like for example the 'American Silver Eagle' 1oz bullion coin (usually bought more than one at a time). I only mention this because people prefer .999 silver that is recognisable like the American Silver Eagle for instance.

Paper silver is some form of trading mechanism that they use on the commodities exchange (COMEX) and as far as I understand it they manipulate the price of silver and gold using the paper silver/gold by trading it back and forth between themselves without actually having to move the metals. While doing this they somehow take profit based on their knowledge of the price moves (I believe the market reacting to their activity).

The thing with the paper silver is if everyone who owned it asked for delivery they wouldn't have enough silver to cover it by a long shot, there are provisions that they can settle the trade in cash based on the value of the silver they own but the reality is if people all of a sudden wanted to take delivery of their silver it would cause a bit of a furor because they just can't satisfy the potential demand and expectations would be challenged. I believe that the expectation is that they would get silver and not realise it's within the exchange's right to settle in cash.

This is a really rough (possibly misguided) explanation as I'm not all that interested in the specifics of this stuff but it might give you a starting point to look into.

Someone recommended this earlier if you can be bothered to watch it, there is some good info there: https://youtu.be/CjBR0iGDmZA

Generally speaking, tea/coffee sets are made of sterling and sometimes coin silver-i.e. .800-.950 silver content, bullion rounds/bars are made of .999/.9999 pure silver. Thus the flatware WILL have value related to actual silver content-but to exchange that value for fiat $$ in this the final acts of the fiat play would not be good. There is a possibility that once the gold standard is established, the superior examples of tea sets would be in the priceless category.. This comes from 20 years of buying and selling silver in many forms.