Bitcoin's Whitepaper Found on Mac Devices. Is Apple a Secret Bitcoin Supporter?
The discovery was made public on April 5th, in a blog post by blogger Andy Baio, who revealed that a PDF of the BTC whitepaper has been included in every modern copy of macOS since version 10.14.0
The discovery was made public on April 5th, in a blog post by a blogger Andy Baio, who revealed that a PDF of the BTC whitepaper had been included in every modern copy of macOS since version 10.14.0. Baio further explained that the whitepaper has not been removed since its inclusion, and it's been included in every version of macOS from Mojave (10.14.0), released in September 2018, to the current version. However, it is not present in High Sierra (10.13) or earlier. “I’ve asked over a dozen Mac-using friends to confirm, and it was there for every one of them”, the blog post reads.
As per, the blog post, Baio became aware of the Bitcoin whitepaper rather by accident while trying to fix his printer. He discovered that the file is used in the Image Capture utility as a sample document for a device called "Virtual Scanner II," which is either hidden or not installed by default for everyone. When Baio switched the media type from Photo to Document, Satoshi Nakamoto's original whitepaper laying out the Bitcoin (BTC) network appeared.
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Baio was surprised to find that there is virtually nothing about this online, and he shared a November 2020 Twitter thread from designer Joshua Dickens to find the file location. He created a prompt to use in Terminal, a command-line interface for macOS, so others could bring up the whitepaper easily.
A member of the Apple community from 2021 also recognized the appearance of the white paper in the Apple forum, but neither Apple nor its workers have provided an explanation.
The reasons behind Apple's decision to embed the whitepaper in its operating system remain a mystery. Baio speculates on possible reasons for that.
“Of all the documents in the world, why was the Bitcoin whitepaper chosen? Is there a secret Bitcoin maxi working at Apple? The filename is “simpledoc.pdf” and it’s only 184 KB. Maybe it was just a convenient, lightweight multipage PDF for testing purposes, never meant to be seen by end users.”
