Now I'm confused. Bitcoin is not lighter weight than existing digital cash. It's not really lighter weight than anything. Well, possibly the large hadron collider consumes more, I don't know.
You can go through life without ever using physical cash. You get paid digitally, you buy groceries digitally. You even borrow money for a house digitally.
The thing you transact with is digital, liquid and fungible. In what sense is it not cash?
I don’t think any common definition of cash includes the idea that payments are “irreversible”. I don’t even see why this is so important. If someone pays me physical cash by mistake they have legal recourse to get it back. It’s not finder’s keepers.