it's not necessarily either.
Discussion
It’s the best way I can describe. It’s an IOU that you control. The IOU can be rugged 🤷♂️
ecash tokens are anonymous authorization tokens. what they authorize could vary. for example in coinjoin protocols they authorize you to register an output.
btw you could say ecash notes are "bearer tokens", but tokens are bearer authorization for some resource. so it's fully redundant.