This is fairly exciting news. It seems the Taipei Metro, in a bid to move away from paper waste caused by the hundreds of thousands of tickets it generates everyday has decided to do away with paper tickets and implement single use IC coins (on top of the IC cards already in use) instead. How this works:
1. Travelers purchase their ticket based on their current station and their intended destination. A base price is generated based on distance between the two.
2. A blank IC coin then has this information written on it (honestly, It's just the base price) and is then given out vending machine style.
3. The user scans the coin when the enter the root station, and when they get to their final destination, they deposit the coin in the turnstile, which then opens for them if the fare is correct. If not, they can always just go to a nearby IC ticket machine and add additional fare onto the ticket.
Simple, conservative, and fully automated. The much larger Tokyo Metro might benefit from this tech too. This kind of IC tech use intrigues me since it means that we're moving much closer to being able to mass produce these for use in games too at an affordable price to the consumer.
As you can see above, just a tiny little IC coin. Cute!