You just contact the central authorisation server and get a universal authorisation request authorisation. Then, you take the universal authorisation request a

You just contact the central authorisation server and get a universal authorisation request authorisation. Then, you take the universal authorisation request authorisation token and hand it off to the counter incrementing authorisation server which gives you a counter incrementing authorisation token. Then, you take the counter incrementing authorisation token to your local counter incrementing server and ask it to increment the counter by 1. In turn, your local counter incrementing server checks that your counter incrementing authorisation token was indeed signed by the central authorisation server and issues a counter incrementing operation to one of the 8 central counter incrementing servers. Of course, your local counter incrementing server is itself authorised by the central authorisation server and the counter incrementing authorisation server to issue authoritative counter increment operations; so if its own local counter incrementing authorisation token has expired (5 minutes), it also has to do steps 1-3 to renew its authorisation to perform authoritative counter incrementing operations. This doesn't concern you, as all those requests are buffered so this section is purely informative. Your own authorisation tokens also have expirations (5 minutes for the unviersal authorisation request authorisation token and ~10 seconds for the specific authorisation tokens) so you best issue your requests promptly and make sure to renew the tokens. Should your token expire before you have completed your counter increment request to your local counter increment server, perform steps 2-4 (or 1-4 if more than 5 minutes have elapsed since you acquired your universal authorisation request authorisation token). Expect to receive a counter increment confirmation message within the next 2 full moons by carrier pigeon. Super simple stuff.