Oddbean

yes, but no. I wouldnt have in any occasion more then 30000 sats distribuited across different mints, ecash dont replace self custodial lightning nodes to stack more sats, and even dont replace the onchain cold storage. Frankly if one of the 3 mints rug my 10000 sats its terrible, but not so terrible. Theres space for improvement in making proof of lyabilities easy and to implement some clean game-theory solituon to make the trust easyer to reach and avoid rugs (microfees and web of trust are a good starting point...).

In order to get the ecash, you need to send an onchain transaction to open a lightning channel, pay onchain fees, then send btc to the mint on lightning, pay fees on that again, then you get the ecash which needs to be withdrawn later - all that for $5? Whats the use case for buying something with ecash for $5?

no, you dont id you cant afford: you can buy with fiat or exchange some other resources or wokr directly for ecash, like you can use $ without depositing gold in a bank. Then, when you exceed the amount that is ok to have in a bank you can buy a some liquidity for a non-custodial channel by some provider and start your stack. If, at some point, you will reach an amout that have sense to detain in a on-chain utxo, you can swap. Today bitcoiners joined ecash by the path: on-chain ----> lightning ----> ecash but in the future the path would be probably the opposite, and I think would be a good way to scale bitcoin adoption, with ecash neo-banks replacing old banks.