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.
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.