CoinTelegraph: You used to be one of Namecoin's biggest cheerleaders. What happened?
Michael Dean: So here's my opinion, which is really going to get me hated, but I think Namecoin as a decentralized DNS-type system is dead.
It's had nearly four years to catch on, and it has pretty much zero adoption. There are 100,000s of squatted domains, but only about 30 developed Dot-Bit sites. All of those are mirrors of Dot-Com or Dot-Net or Dot-Org sites (as they probably should be, to provide redundancy and protection against censorship), and about half of those 30 sites are mine.
There are probably less than 5,000 people in the world set up to actually view Dot-Bit sites, based on downloads of MeowBit and FreeSpeechMe. There was a lot of mining and trading of Namecoin, and a lot of squatting domains, but almost no building of domains or use of resolvers.
The problem is three-fold:
1. Namecoin wasn't easy enough to use. The wallet still sucks, and there were no resolvers or good tutorials until I got involved. And that was three years after Namecoin existed. If they'd had a great wallet, a good resolver, and good tutorials from day one, Dot-Bit domains could likely be universal by now.
The developers spent way too much time working on the nuance of perfecting each leaf in the forest (adding tons of minute functions most people wouldn't use) without seeing the overall picture of trees (usability to drive adoption).
“It's a pity, because these guys are all absolutely brilliant computer scientists, but they have zero idea how to spread something and get adoption.” ...
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