Fifty thousand dollars of gold fits in a coat pocket.
Fifty thousand dollars of silver needs a hand truck.
That sentence is the entire article, and everything below it is just arithmetic.
Yes, you can buy silver bars with a gold IRA. There is no such thing as a gold IRA in the tax code anyway. There is a self directed IRA that holds precious metals, and silver is one of the four permitted metals.
Same account. Same custodian. Same vault. No new paperwork.
What changes is the bill, and it changes in a way almost nobody mentions until after the wire clears.