My recollection of refresh tokens was for security and revocation.

security: By having a short lived access token, a compromised access token 
would limit the time an attacker would have access

revocation: if the access token is self contained, authorization can be revoked 
by not issuing new access tokens. A resource does not need to query the 
authorization server to see if the access token is valid.This simplifies access 
token validation and makes it easier to scale and support multiple 
authorization servers.  There is a window of time when an access token is 
valid, but authorization is revoked. 



On 2011-08-11, at 10:40 AM, Anthony Nadalin wrote:

> Nowhere in the specification is there explanation for refresh tokens, The 
> reason that the Refresh token was introduced was for anonymity. The scenario 
> is that a client asks the user for access. The user wants to grant the access 
> but not tell the client the user's identity. By issuing the refresh token as 
> an 'identifier' for the user (as well as other context data like the 
> resource) it's possible now to let the client get access without revealing 
> anything about the user. Recommend that the above explanation be included so 
> developers understand why the refresh tokens are there.
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