Every current release of the Mac operating system for Apple’s computers supposedly has a secret copy of Satoshi Nakamoto‘s initial whitepaper that lays out the Bitcoin network. Technologist Andy Baoi reported this in a blog post, saying that a PDF of the Bitcoin whitepaper “apparently shipped with every copy of macOS since Mojave in 2018.”
The Accidental Bitcoin Whitepaper Discovery
Baio stated he was “just trying to fix my printer” and using a wireless scanner when a “Virtual Scanner II” device that he had “never seen before” suddenly appeared.
When Baio adjusted the media type from “Photo” to “Document,” the Virtual Scanner II purportedly displayed Nakamoto’s whitepaper by default. Then he clarified that he was merely attempting to fix his printer and wasn’t looking for the Bitcoin whitepaper.
Baio claimed in a post that there is “virtually nothing about this online,” and he also reposted Joshua Dickens’ November 2020 Twitter thread, where he discovered the whitepaper. That is what Baio allegedly used to locate the file.
Baio then went on to construct a prompt for usage in Terminal, a command line interface for macOS, so that others could quickly access the whitepaper. He also indicated that he conducted more research by asking his Mac user friends if they could validate his claims, to which he replied that they could.
When Cointelegraph tried the prompt, it successfully launched the Bitcoin whitepaper on three distinct Apple Mac devices. In light of this, Baio asserted that the aforementioned file is present in “every version of macOS from Mojave (10.14.0) to the current version (Ventura), but isn’t in High Sierra (10.13) or earlier.”
It is uncertain why Nakamoto’s whitepaper is included with newer versions of macOS. However, according to Baio’s essay, it was “just a convenient, lightweight multipage PDF for testing purposes, never intended to be seen by end users.”
