The Bitcoin white paper is hidden in macOS system folders for some reason

If you’re using a Mac and want to brush up on the basics of Bitcoin, you’ve got good news: blogger Andy Baio discovered that “every modern copy of macOS”includes a copy of Satoshi Nakamoto’s original Bitcoin datasheet hidden in the macOS system. folders and are accessible with a simple terminal command.

Here is the command you can use to open it on your Mac:

open /System/Library/Image\ Capture/Devices/VirtualScanner.app/Contents/Resources/simpledoc.pdf

We’ve confirmed the document exists on a fully updated Mac running Ventura 13.3, and Baio says the 188KB PDF appears to date back to Mojave 2018 (not in High Sierra 2017).

A 188 KB PDF file is included with the VirtualScanner.app system application. This is almost certainly due to the “import from iPhone”continuous camera feature, which allows you to insert images or documents “scanned”by your iPhone or iPad’s camera directly into the macOS app. This feature was originally introduced in Mojave, the same version of macOS that added the Bitcoin white paper.

Baio says that a “little bird” told him that having the Bitcoin whitepaper was reported internally by Apple as a problem “almost a year ago” and that it was assigned to “the same engineer who put the PDF there the first time.” place.”Since then, it has apparently been overlooked and the whitepaper still exists.

The Bitcoin White Paper isn’t the only secret document included with macOS. For years, the Pages app included a small “apple.txt”file with the full text of the speech from Apple’s old “That’s crazy “ad, as well as former CEO Steve Jobs’ 2005 Stanford graduation speech. The document no longer appears in the current version of Pages.

We contacted Apple to see if the company has anything to add. In the absence of an answer, the simplest explanation is that the odd but ultimately harmless inclusion in the whitepaper is an easter egg hidden by some cryptocurrency enthusiast at Apple, and we expect it to disappear in a future update now that it was noticed.