Mohammad Sadoghi is an Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of California, Davis. Formerly, he was an Assistant Professor at Purdue University and a Research Staff Member at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. He leads the ExpoLab research group with the mission to pioneer a resilient data platform at scale under his flagship project called Apache ResilientDB (Incubating), a distributed blockchain ledger centered around a democratic and decentralized computational model. He has over 100 publications in leading database conferences/journals, and 36 filed U.S. patents. He has co-authored several books: "Transaction Processing on Modern Hardware" and "Fault-tolerant Distributed Transactions on Blockchain," both published by Morgan & Claypool Synthesis Lectures on Data Management (now under Springer) and a book published by Foundations and Trends® in Databases, entitled "Consensus in Data Management: From Distributed Commit to Blockchain."

• Chapter 1. On the Concepts of Democracy.- Chapter 2. Philosophical Perspectives.- Chapter 3. Computational Perspectives.- Chapter 4. Fault-Tolerant Consensus Protocols.- Chapter 5. Sociotechnology Reform: Call for Reflection.- Chapter 6. Final Remarks: A Path Forward.