Over 14 years ago, on October 31, 2008, an anonymous individual or entity called Satoshi Nakamoto published the revolutionary whitepaper “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System”, which birthed a $1.18 trillion crypto industry and game-changing blockchain technology and turned the financial sector on its head.
In a stunning discovery, tech blogger Andy Baio has uncovered that a copy of the ground-breaking BTC whitepaper has been hiding within Apple’s Mac devices.
Apple’s Epic Satoshi Tribute
Apple Inc. just gave its biggest nod to Satoshi Nakamoto yet.
Independent blogger Andy Baio revealed in a Wednesday blog post that a PDF of the Bitcoin Whitepaper has apparently shipped with every copy of macOS since 2018, from Mojave to the current Ventura. It’s, however, not in the older High Sierra (10.13) version or earlier. Baio said he came across a device named “Virtual Scanner II” that he had never seen before while just trying to fix his printer. This device stores Satoshi’s vision within the Image Capture Utility. When the technologist changed the media format from “photo” to “document”, the whitepaper appeared.
In order to see the whitepaper, macOS users can open a terminal on their computers and type the following commands into the terminal:
“open /System/Library/Image\ Capture/Devices/VirtualScanner.app/Contents/Resources/simpledoc.pdf”
They can alternatively look through the system folder in Finder.
Baio also referenced a November 2020 Twitter thread from designer Josh Dickens, who also highlighted the presence of the whitepaper on his Mac.
The inclusion of the iconic document in modern Apple devices has raised questions about the tech giant’s motivations within the crypto community. As ZyCrypto reported back in November 2021, Apple CEO Tim Cook admitted to owning cryptocurrencies, further indicating that he had been researching them “for a while”.
It’s unclear why the original Bitcoin Whitepaper was included in the modern versions of the operating system for Mac computers. Baio, however, suggested in his post that it was likely “just a convenient, lightweight multipage PDF for testing purposes, never meant to be seen by end users.”
A reliable source informed Baio that the issue was filed internally about a year ago and was assigned to the same coder responsible for putting the whitepaper PDF in the system originally. Still, that individual is yet to take any action or comment on the matter since.
Whether Apple removes it in the near future through its regular software updates for macOS users remains to be seen.
