Incremental Api screen cast with laravel 5.4

Hi I am going through Laracast Incremental api screen cast https://laracasts.com/series/incremental-api-development and I am little confused about the authentication part of it. As the screen cast is using laravel 4. I am trying to learn about building REST Api from it and practicing it in Laravel 5.4. Now I am confused, should I use the token to authenticate the apis or should I use Laravel passport and if passport then why ?