We are basically back to 2020 trying to get people to understand that an NFT is NOT the underlying asset it abstractly represents…
Please go on as I do not get your point.
Tokens don’t have an inherent value and have no other properties that would make they tradeable.
Another way to think about it: a company that spends $1M on tokens is burning that money hoping they will be able to recoup by generating a better product. If it would be tradeable, they could spend $1M to generate tokens, produce absolutely no product, and just resell all those tokens to get their money back. That’s obviously nonsense, that’s not at all what tokens are. And they cannot transform the tokens they got into compute, you need to consume hardware and energy to mint tokens, you cannot convert tokens into hardware
No one is talking about trading tokens.
The idea being that getting your tokens from Provider A is no different than Provider B, especially if they both offer the same model. You can change one value in a request to openrouter and suddenly be hitting a different provider but offering the same tokens, because they offer the same model and the same settings.
You're describing a commodity. However, the commodity isn't the tokens, but the compute capacity, i.e., serving a model. And compute capacity isn't a currency — at least not, until you can acquire compute capacity from one party and exchange it with another party.
dgellow is absolutely right: tokens aren't a currency, nor can you trade them, nor are they fungible. The original claim that "tokens are just a type of currency" [1] makes no sense.