Similarly, seasteads will trade extensively with land-based businesses. The people who profit from those relationships will encourage their government not to interfere and drive away the seasteads business.
LOL That's classic. Because the economic bolstering of doing business with a community of a couple thousand people (at most) definitely outweighs the advantage of simply blockading food from the community and then seizing all the assets.
My question is, in this modern era, why should a nation-state try to grab a floating platform?
For the nearest countries, the seastead or seasteads will be a source of income in terms of trans-shipment, rental for inventories stored, consumers of products, remittance from contract labour(maybe).
The way I look at it, atleast in the initial times, most of the "assets" of the seastead will be intellectual in nature with the money being some variant of bitcoin. After the invention of bitcoin, it is really stupid for a seastead community to maintain its wealth in gold or anything that can be seized. There will be some fuel, food and medicine stocks, but they won't be valuable enough to raid a community for. There will be a small power plant, again, not major enough to raid for and easily sabotagable.
Raids to take over the place and raids to shut down the place are different types of actions as far as seasteaders are concerned.
I think i demonstrated why raids to take over the "wealth" of the place will be unproductive.
Raids to shut down the place - Now, that is a threat of a different category altogether. Early seasteads cannot afford to bring this upon themselves. Thye cannot fight modern nations. Later seasteads - as seasteads grow in reputation and people become more aware of them, there is a greater and greater chance that people will know someone who bought from there, someone who sold something there. The relationships increase. This acts as the first buffer. There are calls to shut down tax havens, but they have not caught on yet.
The second buffer will be increased defence preparedness, which will increase the expected casualty rate of the attacking forces, hopefully enough to tip the scale over to the "not attcking" decision.