Halo from orbit -- bandwidth needs (was A buck a squafoot)

> Also, since communications are not the only envisioned market,
> there might be new demand anyway to serve the other envisioned
> markets

Imagine that you had an investment in some prime North Korean real
estate and upon sale of said real estate you reaped a substantial
capital gain. How exactly will you extract that capital gain from the
North Korean economy and transfer it to your resident country so that
you can enjoy the financial benefits of the gain? Recall that North
Korea is an autarky and thus has no means to facilitate currency trading.

The same situation applies to orbital commerce. If you make a
bazillion dollars supplying orbital citizens with apples or oxygen or
titanium and you want to take that profit back down to Earth then
there needs to be a system of transferring wealth between Earth and
Orbit, and a balance of payment system is integral to that process.
Earth will likely be buying a lot of energy from Orbital structures
and the amount that they pay to Orbit will be offset by what Orbit
buys from Earth. If Orbit sells more to Earth than they buy then you
can trade your Spacebucks for Earthbucks because there would be a
surplus of Earthbucks credited to Orbital entities and there's not
much that they can do with these surplus Earthbucks way up in orbit
because those Earthbucks no longer represent an efficient medium of
exchange because the cost for shipment of goods is so excessive.

The only markets that would allow efficient trade between Earth and
Orbit are those which bypass the necessity for shipping, ie.
information, energy, and high-value/low-mass merchandise. In the case
of information/knowledge trading the obvious pitfall is that if the
information/knowledge isn't built on a foundation of competitive
advantage (building on unique orbital characteristics) then it will
likely be provided more efficiently from Earth-based sources.

>-- tax-haven (zero income/capital-gains/business taxes,
> including zero social-security/medicare/medicaid and RICO-status
> for labor unionizing),

If the orbital society sets itself up as a tax haven, and as you argue
imposes no income tax or capital gains tax, then how does it benefit
from establishing itself as a tax haven?