TL;DR: Bitcoin does not enable The Diamond Age.
TL;DR: Bitcoin does not enable The Diamond Age.
That could never happen in a free country.
The simpler thing that has happened in pretty much every free country already, is that a government gets to determine what currency tax debts are to be paid in. Furthermore, the state has the capacity to determine that a specific currency must be accepted "for all debts public and private". Having a standard unit of account benefits the society just as other standardizations do, by strengthening network effects.
In a non-failed state with a relatively stable currency there is just no clear path for a different unit of account to overcome these advantages and gain any significant market share (if you have an example I'd love to hear it). Even without legal frameworks enforcing the old order, backwards-compatible marginal improvements to protocols like IPv6 have had weak adoption, because the simplicity and spread of the established protocol makes it good enough. Government supported currencies are even more entrenched.
Also, why would a state give up it's printing press? No clue what the Diamond Age is, but I will check it out.