Tokenomics are Coming

There is an old joke about a man who sells ten dollar bills for five dollars each. When asked how the business is going, he says it is booming, he just needs more volume. For four years we have watched the smartest people in technology reinvent this joke, add a chatbot and agents to it, and raise money at a valuation that assumes the man will one day discover a margin hidden inside the ten dollar bill. The economics of a token, the little unit of text an AI model receives and emits, and the slowly dawning realization that every single one of those tokens costs real money to produce, and that producing more of them faster currently is not a path to profit but a more efficient path to the same cliff. The revelation that everyone already knewWhen a company files to go public, it has to stop talking like a founder and start talking like an accountant. The prospectus is the one document where the vibes are legally required to reconcile with the numbers. And the recent filings on the road…