to use your analogy. in the real world most managers of publically traded companies try to increase the price these are traded at. meanwhile, people buy based

to use your analogy. in the real world most managers of publically traded companies try to increase the price these are traded at. meanwhile, people buy based on their expectation of future price. So, this is a casino where the dealers are trying to make the chips worth more. It doesn't matter why, this is just reality (generally). But the dealers don't just deal chips all day - they spend real money in the real world, and loads of it. On sales, manufacturing, advertising, research and development, infrastructure, you name it. All to (again, generalizing) increase the price their chips are being traded at. (For various reasons they have incentive to do this, or if not incentive then at least philosophy/approach.) Say you meet the dealer named (CEO of x). Now if you can convince him that doing y action in the real world will increase the price of his tokens, he might just do it. Even if it means spending millions or billions of his company's money. This is the status quo. Now, what are the results of this status quo? Does it mean that companies will do whatever will increase their share price? No. Does it mean companies will do whatever they expect will increase their share price? No. Does it mean share price realistically reflects a company's investment in doing something to become financially or objectively or in some way convincingly "better"? No. Nothing follows from this, but there are some things that almost follow. One of them is that in the real world real money is being spent trying to get real customers, to get real innovations, and so on. In a way, the precisely discovered price of a casino token is like a carrot on a stick. It points somewhere, (to stretch the analogy it points up or down), and does so as a result of the rider moving it. In this case the 'rider' is investor opinion. (Alternatively, though false, you can assume that all information in the world is factored into the price, that the price is somehow 'efficient' with respect to all the information in the world about that company that's public. While ridiculous and false, this is/was a dominant or important academic model for a long time.) What I'm getting at is that it's a lot simpler than just being tokens. There is a complex system here that you can draw some generalizations from. I mean, to take nothing else, just remember that when a company's "token" price gets too low, its investors will vote for an acquisition in cash by a bigger company in the same industry at a premium over its "token price". That would have a very real effect in the real world. It's just so much more complicated than you give it credit for. Is it good? Should we have it? Well, all the recent private equity activity says, you know, not always. But there are some interesting things that happen when you put your company into the 'token world.' It's most certainly not just tokens.