They use a lot of buzzwords but it comes down to one thing for me. Their security relies on trusting everyone in the federated group. Yes this has worked fairly well for the global DNS system but it has nothing to do with blockchains.
This is exactly the opposite of the Bitcoin model and a great example of the nonsensical hype around so-called blockchain technology. There is no real security if you have to trust a handful of the big guys to play fair.
The DNS was our inspiration. The fmr CEO and CTO are advisors and guided us through the process to build both the technology and the surrounding incentive and collaboration model.
To your point about "have to trust a handful of big guys to play fair," please refer to exhibit A - https://blockchain.info/pools - where 2 miners control 52% and 4 miners control over 75% of the hashing power. If that's not trusting a handful of guys to play fair, I don't know what is.
We can take a permissioned, federated model because we have no native asset coin that needs to be backed up by wasteful mining, meaning that BigchainDB can handle an infinite number of assets on the same ledger. That, along with our pipelining innovation, we can hit writes/s up to 2 million.
And it scales. BigchainDB isn't meant to replace Bitcoin, it's meant to serve enterprise customers who want to be able to run blockchain systems in production, at scale.
This is exactly the opposite of the Bitcoin model and a great example of the nonsensical hype around so-called blockchain technology. There is no real security if you have to trust a handful of the big guys to play fair.