You spend $100 to get tokens from Claude. Then go to your friend and tell them you are willing to sell the tokens you got for $50, it’s a bargain! They look at you, tell you that makes absolutely no sense, and why the fuck would they want to buy your tokens, ie something that only makes sense in your very specific prompting context.

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