No More Bitcoin? Apple Removes BTC White Paper from Latest Mac OS Upgrade
The Bitcoin white paper has been removed from the latest beta version of the Apple operating system upgrade, according to a report by 9to5Mac. The white paper had been secretly shipped inside all versions of the Apple Mac operating system since 2018.
A blog post authored by the technologist Andy Baio on April 5 disclosed that a PDF copy of Satoshi Nakamoto's Bitcoin white paper had been included with every copy of MacOS over the past five years. The document was found within a tool called Virtual Scanner II in macOS, which was not enabled by default.
The inclusion of the white paper in the tool had been a mystery to many. The Easter egg, a term for a hidden feature, had gone viral earlier this year after a post by technologist Andy Baio. However, 9to5Mac (news site) reported on April 25 that the Apple had removed a test scanner program called Virtual Scanner II from the latest MacOS Ventura 13.4 beta.
Nobody knew why it was there, but it was suspected to be “just a joke among Apple engineers,” the report added.
“The existence of the whitepaper can be easily explained, as it may have been used as a simple test file that is a conveniently small size. The developer building the test app may have been a Bitcoin investor or inserted it as a joke”, according to Apple Insider
Apple Insider also stated that other wilder conspiracy theories have emerged, such as Apple co-founder Steve Jobs being Satoshi Nakamoto.
The removal of the Bitcoin white paper comes at a time when Apple is facing legal challenges over its App Store policies. A California court recently ruled that the tech giant had violated state competition laws by preventing developers from using alternative in-app payment methods. Apple had tried to force NFT creators and developers to use its own payments platform, where they would be charged a 30% commission.
