In terms of custodians, if the reliability of the backing node/mint and the trustworthiness of its operator are otherwise equal, then yes I believe I would agree.

Cashu interests me as a user for privacy reasons and for its potential to facilitate asynchronous payments between users. But I also have uncertainties about those uses.

In terms of privacy, how much of the privacy benefits are lost when performing swaps between mints, or payouts back to lightning, since in both cases it involves a lightning payment?

And in terms of asynchronous payments, is there a way to lock tokens so they can't be redeemed by anyone except the intended recipient, with a timeout so the sender can reclaim the funds after a defined period of time passes? If someone sends me ecash tokens, there is no assurance for me to know it hasn't been redeemed by someone else (including the sender) until I try to redeem it and see that it's still valid.