Until Bitcoin, every government, every bank, and every corporation on earth has used private, double-entry accounting systems controlled 100% by the stakeholders. This means that the stakeholders can alter the books and records of all of these legacy systems in secret, away from the public eye. In order to catch fraud, corruption or even error, the entire stakeholder-controlled system — including every transaction traced back to its root — would need to be audited. This process is time consuming, complicated and cumbersome, and like all legacy systems, the audits are conducted by humans, further subjecting the audit system to fraud, corruption and error.