What if bitcoin does wind up being only accessible by nations or the uber wealthy?  Maybe this falls short of what you have in mind but I believe hard money at the level of nations at least makes war less likely.  That's not too bad.

I'm not really sure of the mechanism that would cause bitcoin to be unusable by individuals.  Is it just that utxo's owned by ordinary people will be so small that fees will render them unspendable?

I think the genie is out of the bottle anyway, if not bitcoin, something else will come along for us average folks to transact in.