Perhaps high frequency trading can be used to finance initial seasteads? Whether tethered barges or tethered balloons are used, someone will likely need to be around to protect them from pirates/vandals/competitors.
"I was told about one particularly wild idea, though: building a microwave network across the Atlantic. Theoretically you would place the microwave transceivers on tethered barges (like a small oil rig, essentially), or alternatively use tethered balloons. Like a terrestrial microwave network, the main advantage would be a massive reduction in latency. Currently it takes about 25 milliseconds for a squirt of light to travel the 3,100 miles from the west coast of England to the east side of Long Island, New York; via microwave, it would be closer to 16 milliseconds.
Nine milliseconds might not sound like a lot, but if you then factor in a microwave network from London to Cornwall (which already exists), and Long Island to New York City (which also already exists), you could get the complete London-NYC latency down to about 25 milliseconds—a damn sight faster than the current by-fibre latency of about 60 milliseconds."
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/11/private-microwave-networks-financial-hft/
"I was told about one particularly wild idea, though: building a microwave network across the Atlantic. Theoretically you would place the microwave transceivers on tethered barges (like a small oil rig, essentially), or alternatively use tethered balloons. Like a terrestrial microwave network, the main advantage would be a massive reduction in latency. Currently it takes about 25 milliseconds for a squirt of light to travel the 3,100 miles from the west coast of England to the east side of Long Island, New York; via microwave, it would be closer to 16 milliseconds.
Nine milliseconds might not sound like a lot, but if you then factor in a microwave network from London to Cornwall (which already exists), and Long Island to New York City (which also already exists), you could get the complete London-NYC latency down to about 25 milliseconds—a damn sight faster than the current by-fibre latency of about 60 milliseconds."
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/11/private-microwave-networks-financial-hft/