[wibblenut]

DNS is distributed, so I think you meant to say decentralised?

But I'm baffled as to why anybody would want to use it? For it to become useful we'd need to go to the extraordinary lengths of replacing substantial infrastructure, at a very great cost - to replace proven technology that scales extremely well?

And it wouldn't surprise me if Harold Camping was mining Bitcoins on the church computer. The end is nigh!

[weavejester]

The DNS system is cached, but ultimately only has 13 roots. Additionally, governments can decide to cut off organisations they consider to be undesirable, and legislation like PROTECT IP would give similar power to private corporations as well.

Some might therefore consider it desirable to have a DNS system outside of this control to compliment the existing system.