just as #bitcoin is like #centralbanks for their central accounting and high security and high cost of transaction
#lightning is like Visa and Mastercard and Western Union and Ria and Moneygram
clearinghouses have efficiencies of scale
lightning has a very high cost of setup and works best with a smaller network, because it is a "who you know" type of network... i refer to it as "brittle"
#ecash is a little bit like physical currency, but fails to achieve this point because it doesn't model the needed properties properly - a real e-cash system needs to have a system of change providers, which in your standard cash based money system, is the cash registers and purses of the vendors using this money in the marketplace
it reminds me, i had an idea some years back for a peer to peer payment system that included the use of third party change providers, and the idea of tokens that were fixed value like money
but i didn't figure out the cryptography of it very well, it's a hard problem
suffice it to say that lightning and ecash really don't advance us from the centralisation tendency that we see with payment network systems... they have high establishment costs and lead times, and this favours big players