"eCash is a bearer asset" i could easily argue it's not really. bearer assets can be transferred without the blessing or involvement of the issuer. that's like the whole point of it.
Discussion
And you can, the eCash can be transferred without the blesding and involvement of thr issuer. eCash to eCash of course.
the mint is the issuer. you can't transfer (at least not in a way that has double spend protection) without the involvement of the mint.
The eCash you can, the thing is not granted is that the mints as the sats that they claim to have
wrong. fyi i'm a bit of an expert on ecash. sort of.
you can make as many copies of an ecash token offline as you want. but handing someone a copy is not exactly "transfer".
to transfer ecash tokens they need to be redeemed at the mint and new one issued where the recipient is the only one that knows the secret. (let's ignore scripted tokens for now!)
that's why i said it's not really a bearer asset in the traditional sense. the mint is an online trusted intermediary that can refuse to participate.
then there is credit ecash, that overall dodge the entire "does the mint have the coin?" stuff.
It’s a bearer IOU 😂
it's not necessarily either.
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.