I think this is giving altcoins too much credit, because it implies that one should actually pay "par" for an altcoin if given the choice. If I knew for certain that 10 units of energy went into creating a stash of bitcoins and 12 units of energy went into creating a stash of litecoins, I wouldn't necessarily trade my bitcoin stash for the litecoin stash. It may be theoretically possible to come up with a measurement of value based on the amount of work put into a coin, but that's far from how people value coins today. Note that in the AI world, bitcoins aren't fungible because ones created at different times have different amounts of energy put into them.

This reminds me of Marx's labor theory of value. Sure, we can calculate how many hours of labor it took various people to produce various goods, and call this their "value", but that bears little resemblance to how real people value things based on supply and demand.

When I decide on my demand for a coin, it has less to do with how much work was put into creating it in the past, and more to do with if I think it'll be more useful than alternatives in the future, and how confident I am that the future supply will be appropriately limited.