If Fritz Haber succeeded in getting gold from sea water?

In the 1920ies, the German chemist Fritz Haber tried to gain gold from sea water, but he failed as there is much less gold in sea water as earlier analysis showed.
Nevertheless, how would our world look like today, if he succeeded and was able to gain all the gold the Germans had to pay to the Allied as compensation for damages in World War I set in Versailles Treaty?
 
Since seawater does not, in fact, contain the level of gold he needed I'm going to say this is ASB.

I presume the OP is that seawater does, in fact, contain that amount of gold. Though that would shoot it into ASB.

Otherwise, Mr. Haakwood makes a good point, that that would make gold worth less. Would that affect reparations levels however, or was it in x pounds worth of gold? If it's the latter, then Germany's benefit will be limited.
 
I presume the OP is that seawater does, in fact, contain that amount of gold. Though that would shoot it into ASB.

Otherwise, Mr. Haakwood makes a good point, that that would make gold worth less. Would that affect reparations levels however, or was it in x pounds worth of gold? If it's the latter, then Germany's benefit will be limited.

It was denominated in gold marks; however, a gold mark was fixed at 358 milligrams of pure gold. So it wouldn't affect reparations levels at all, except that Germany might have to pay the Class C bonds which in reality she was excused from. Either way, it's as if it were denominated in Papiermarks and Germany just printed a whole bunch of them to get rid of it...except that most currencies are based on gold. That might force people off of the gold standard, which is probably a good thing.
 
Here is a pretty good summary on the subject from wiseGeek:

Yes, it is possible to extract gold from seawater in theory, but it's really not practical to do so. It is estimated that there is, in total, about eight million tons of gold dissolved in the world’s oceans. While this is a lot, the oceans are huge, and the actual concentration of gold in seawater is only about 0.0000000006%. To put it another way, there is between 0.1 and 2.0 mg per ton, depending on location, making it uneconomical to extract using any current technology.

The Sea as a Source of Minerals

Since the sea is fed by rivers that flow over land containing metals, minerals and ores, a great variety of these can be found in seawater in the form of soluble compounds. This is added to by material from hydrothermal vents — fractures in geologically active areas of the ocean floor through which hot, mineral-rich water flows into the ocean. The concentration of different elements in the oceans depends not only on their abundance in the Earth’s rocks, but in their reactivity and solubility.

By far the most common metals in seawater are sodium, magnesium, calcium and potassium, in that order. These are all very common, in combined form, in the Earth’s crust, and they can form a variety of compounds that are very soluble in water. Gold, aside from being a rare element, is also very unreactive, and does not easily form compounds that can find their way into the ocean by dissolving in water. For these reasons, the concentration of this metal in seawater is extremely low.

History

Gold was first detected in seawater in 1872 by the British chemist S. Sonstadt, and ever since, a number of people have promoted the idea of extracting the precious metal from the oceans. One of the most notable was the German chemist Fritz Haber, co-inventor of the Haber-Bosch process, who spent a portion of his career attempting to devise a practical method of obtaining the metal from seawater to pay for Germany’s post-World War I debt. When it became clear just how low the concentration of gold actually was, he abandoned his efforts. Despite a number of hoaxes and scams, serious interest in the subject continues, as reserves of gold on the Earth’s surface diminish.


Extraction

Due to the extreme dilution of gold in seawater, there is currently no economically viable method of obtaining the metal from this source. Vast amounts of seawater would have to be evaporated to concentrate it sufficiently to allow it to be recovered by any conventional process. This in itself would require a lot of energy, with more power and raw materials being consumed in the actual extraction process. The cost would amount to far more than the value of the gold obtained.

The only elements that are currently produced commercially from seawater are the non-metals chlorine and bromine. In the latter case, most is obtained from more concentrated non-marine brine deposits, but some is produced in Israel from the very salty waters of the Dead Sea. The concentrations of these elements in seawater are, however, enormously greater than that of gold.

In the past, iodine has been obtained indirectly from the sea by processing seaweed, which concentrates the element. A similar form of biological extraction could conceivably form the basis of a future means of gold production. Although seaweed does not concentrate the metal, some other organisms, such as certain types of bacteria, may do so. It is therefore just possible that organisms of some sort, either natural or genetically engineered, could be used to recover gold from the sea, but this is highly speculative and may never become viable.

So the only way I could see something to work would be somebody discovering an unknown natural organism that concentrates gold. Not technically ASB (the POD would be a biological one thou) but very, very unlikely and not what Harber had in mind.
 
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IIRC since most of the major currencies are on the gold standard and a large percentage of various national reserves were made up of gold wouldn't this fuck up the world economy massively? Assuming that they're able to do it economically then logically the price of gold is going to plummet since there's now a massive new supply, even just the psychological factor is likely to push the price down. Which is actually a point, even if they're able to run the process at a profit if the world price drops like a stone then at a certain point the process likely becomes uneconomical which could see a somewhat shaky equilibrium reached.
 
IIRC since most of the major currencies are on the gold standard and a large percentage of various national reserves were made up of gold wouldn't this fuck up the world economy massively?

I don't think this will be too much of a problem. Depending on how much gold enters the market, most likely the British hold a conference with most of the important central bankers in the world and re-establish the appropriate price in gold for the Pound and thus all other currencies.

The world economy in the 20th Century is not like it was in the 1500s when the arrival of the New World gold in Spain caused massive inflation and disruption. Back then, people really thought gold by itself was wealth and didn't realize a huge influx of gold without a corresponding increase in production of real items would only fuel inflation.

In the worse scenario where so much gold is produced that it becomes meaningless as the basis of currency to curb inflation, the countries of the world would just leave the gold standard - which is what they ended up doing anyway within a few decades.
 
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