Spot on fren

The Chaumian cashu nuts. Is that ecash?

Cashu is one implementation of Chaumian eCash, yes. It is also currently the most popular and functional implementation.

Cool. I’ve been lurking on 100 sats for the past five months. I guess they are okay’er then I expected.

How "OK" they are is entirely dependent on the mint they are from, just like how "OK" custodial Lightning is will vary from custodian to custodian. If you already have a self-custody Lightning wallet, it's never a bad idea to send your eCash balance over to your self-custody Lightning wallet instead.

It's better than lightning because it can be sent asynchronously over any messaging channel, even offline, even if the recipient doesn't have a lightning wallet yet.

Indeed. This has always been the case for abstracting away from the underlying asset; it improves payment speed, reliability, optionality, etc. The nice thing about eCash is that it makes these improvements over custodial Lightning while maintaining the same trust model. The thing that drives me nuts is when people characterize the trust model of Cashu as fundamentally worse than the trust model of custodial Lightning. They're both IOUs that are only as good as the custodian is honest. Perhaps the main issue is that there is such a low barrier to entry to run a mint that users may be more likely to come across some random mint that rugs them, whereas custodial Lightning is typically taken on by businesses trying to build a brand and reputation, so the rug-risk is naturally lower. However, the trust-model itself is exactly the same. Even that can be mitigated with eCash by spreading your risk among multiple mints, so that if one rugs you, it's a minimal loss.

my only concern are people coding to an ecash interface instead of a lightning interface. that would be pretty bad for self sovereignty.

Also, LN invoices can be converted to an internal send if necessary if on the same mint.