> So, where is our fully decentralized TLD alternative, free of ICANN or any central authority to handle how we grant names by conventions, without any money scheme in the game that attracts malevolent actors moving only through greed strings?

We can all edit our hosts file.

The problem with a lack of a central authority is domain names are most useful if they follow the highlander principle. There can only be one neil.fraser.name ... otherwise it's not usable for routing traffic if every webserver a Neil Fraser runs uses that address. (Yes, there are useful ways for one name to resolve to different webservers, but almost always those are webservers under at least loose control of a single entity or very exceptional cases)

Namecoin (.bit) was an attempt to create naming system without a central authority using a blockchain.

But from what I remember, they fucked up the pricing function and it got overrun by domain grabbers.