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.

> spidering the .bit sites, but indexing them by numeric IP rather than DNS names.

And as soon as the site operator moves to a different VPS host, all links get broken.

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.