I think the key lesson from history is that there are a number of factors that have to align for a paradigm shift to take place, but that from time to time they do happen.
There are tons of examples from history of things that people thought would never change or technologies that were thought to be dead in the water that ended up completely displacing previous alternatives.
Pretty much every technological communication technology falls into that category.
Adoption will be incredibly slow or won't happen at all up until a certain point, where the tail of exponential growth kicks in and suddenly, it's everywhere. Look at mobile phones: it took years after the introduction of mobile phones for them to become ubiquitous. I doubt anyone could have predicted that there would be more mobile phones than people in the world within ten years.
I'm not saying that namecoin will take over. I do think it is possible, depending on what happens with the regular DNS system. At the moment, the need for an alternative is just not there for most people. That may not be true forever.
Look at IPv6: from the current state of IPv6 adoption, it would be possible to throw up your hands and declare it a failure, and say that it will never happen. I think that there will come a point where the price of IPv4 addresses is high enough to push widespread adoption, and at that point, everyone will be using it at once. And afterwards, people will look back and wonder why it took so long and how things could change over night. That's just the way things work.
"mobile phones: it took years after the introduction of mobile phones"
Mobile phones (and before that "car phones") solved a problem that benefited practically everyone. It was a matter of price dropping not a matter of benefit.
There are people that care about this issue but not enough to ever hit a tipping point.
How many people out there care enough to run a daemon on their home computers to participate in a decentralized file replication system? That's a nice theoretical thing for nerds, but nobody will ever do it, right?
P2P exploded once people realized that they could participate in it to get content that they want. What makes you think this would be any different?
If a decentralized DNS plugin is necessary to easily access pirated content, then such a plugin will become as widespread as P2P clients, i.e. pretty widespread.
That's enough of a tipping point: everyone who wants to access stuff which makes a government angry knows to install the "uncensored Internet plugin", and the censorship measure becomes pointless.
It could be made easier if Google indexed .bit content, but even if they don't, another search engine will take up this niche, as astalavista.box.sk did more than a decade ago.
Also, they could sidestep the DNS censorship issue, by spidering the .bit sites, but indexing them by numeric IP rather than DNS names.
If there starts to be a lot of content located at .bit domains, if all the major browsers become peers, or if the process of getting a domain becomes very easy.. if any of those things happen, I could see the situation change.
Look, I don't expect the current DNS system to suddenly collapse. Who knows what the future holds, though? It's only been 20 years since the Soviet Union fell. Perhaps in 20 years, we have a new Union oppressing people on a massive scale. Decentralised mechanisms for communication look a whole lot more interesting when your life is on the line.
The death of Kazaa was a major contribution to BitTorrent usage. If it becomes the easiest way of accessing pirated content then I could see it doing very well.
Others here have said that SOPA, or other forms of it won't go away even if the current bid to censor does not succeed. Lobbyists spend so much time and money pushing these bills down our collective throat. They do this under the impression that there are no other recourse for us, right? Explain BitTorrent. Explain BitCoin. Technologies like these may not always be successful, but they are created by people who are very passionate and intelligent. I'd argue that these visionaries are more mobilized than lobbyists, perhaps more passionate as a big cheque isn't being paid to them.
Lobbyists fight wars in self interest, hackers innovate for the people. In the end, evolution always wins.
Nobody has ever had a gun to their head in the same way as the SOPA act threatens to do. Other domain shenanigans may be annoying but nobody has ever prevented people from obtaining any domain before.
One of the most important things I take away from this isn't that anyone has subverted DNS-based filtering with a popular, easy-to-use system, but rather that they could. In an argument against SOPA/ProtectIP/etc., it is very powerful not only to be able to say "DNS based filtering is easily subverted" but to be able to point to specific examples of it being subverted.
There's a lot of power, I think, to end an argument against SOPA with "...and, at the end of the day, it won't stop anyone. It won't work." Having functional, working systems only bolsters that argument, and thus helps, rather than hurts, the case against this kind of ludicrous legislation.
100% in agreement with this. Take spam which is a much larger significant problem. In order to eliminate spam you'd have to get everyone to completely change the email protocol habits usage etc. There is no way to patch over it. That hasn't and isn't going to happen. Major providers who control access aren't going to go along with any alternate root. And getting people to program in individually alternative dns servers or do anything "technical" in nature won't create enough critical mass. (Majority of domain names registered even with the availability of alternate tlds and cctlds are still .com)
"And getting people to program in individually alternative dns servers or do anything "technical" in nature won't create enough critical mass"
That has happened before. When YouTube got blocked for some stupid reason in Turkey for months, millions of people used alternative dns servers to bypass the block. It's easy enough to automate, which means it's simply a matter of demand.
The idea is much, much older than your project. Consider ipv6, and everyone is TRYING to adopt that.
Repeat after me: nobody will use an alternate root.
PS: Yes, I know what namecoin is, and the idea is stupid. It may not be an alternate traditional dns root, but the point is exactly the same.