You can't really think Calle is a scammer. He's working on something that has a trust model with specific implications, and may in the end not be a great scaling solution. That doesn't mean he's a scammer.
I think there was confusion because of a stupid argument that "e-cash is a bearer asset". This is technically true, in exactly the same way that a dollar bill is. There is a layer of trust abstracted away.
I'm not particularly bullish on e-cash, but I think it's possible to have a solution where mints provide snapshots of their issuance that is contestable by all holders of e-cash created by that mint. It doesn't solve the rug risk, but it solves fractional reserves.
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What he's working on would be fine for certain things if not for the dishonest narratives around it, but if he did then it also wouldn't be intriguing. That's the scam.
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@justin_shocknet link to that tweet?
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Because the mint is trusted anyway, it is probably fine for the mint to perform a trusted setup for the zero-knowledge proofs here. After all, if the mint wants to steal funds, it can just spend the bitcoin, and shut all its servers down – no fancy cryptography required.