An important piece of experience is the value of the TOKEN. Today, more than ever, tokens play an increasing important role in our interaction with APIs and microservices. They allow for authentication but more importantly a definition of services in a micro-services architecture.
{
“message”: “Authorization Error”,
“errors”: [
{
“resource”: “Athlete”,
“field”: “access_token”,
“code”: “invalid”
}
]
}
One memory that continues to remind me of this value comes from the experience of carnivals and arcades that require you to buy tickets or coins in advance to use at the rides, booths, and games. This experience provides critical insight to the emerge of the way in which our experiences are changing both in the physical and virtual worlds.
I was asked recently about Bitcoin as a currency and why would someone use it instead of the globally recognized United States dollar. The story of the USD is very pervasive and difficult to disrupt. Even the serial # on a USD gives some unique identifiable symbol to track. However, it’s not a token. A token indicates something much different than a serial number. A token can be transferred and transmuted much better than a serial number tied to a physical object. In fact, it can have multiple usages. Think of an arcade and they way in which a token can be used for multiple games. A token, like Bitcoin, can be used for playing multiple games, outside of just purchase a good or service.
Our experience of this “tokenization” of the world will continue to manifest in the collection of these tokens into wallets that allow us access to interact with services automatically. Cars will have wallets and so will the refrigerators.
Today, the boom of ICOs (initial coin offerings) is an attempt to landgrab through creating the tokens that will be used to facilitate the world of transactions and things. There are now tokens for computing, storage, predictions, etc. Even companies like @shapeshift have emerged to transmute these tokens across different use cases. So before you start playing in the arcade, you might want to grab a few tokens.
Welcome comments and when you last used a token and were aware of it.
twitter: benmorris