Bitcoin Whitepaper Has Been Concealed in MacOS Since 2018

The American tech blogger Andy Baio shared a blog on April 5 on his page Waxy, revealing that he has identified the secret presence of the Bitcoin whitepaper penned by the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto, in every copy of Apple’s MacOS.

Notably, the technology enthusiast claimed that the Bitcoin paper that set the basic structure of the Bitcoin network has been concealed in PDF format within each MacOS version since 2018 with the launch of Apple’s desktop operating system Mojave.

The popular Chinese reporter Collin Wu on his Twitter page Wu Blockchain shared the news on the discovery of the Bitcoin whitepaper, stating “Tech blogger Andy Baio discovered that the Bitcoin whitepaper can be found on any Mac running the latest version of MacOS”:

While explaining the incident, Baio affirmed that this discovery wasn’t intentional, but it accidentally happened while he was “trying to fix my [his] printer”.

Previously, in 2021, on the MacOS Community Forum, a person with the username bernd178 posted that he found a function called Virtual Scanner II, not enabled by default, under the Image Capture Utility. He added that concealed under the Virtual Scanner II was an image of a bay in San Francisco and the PDF copy of the Bitcoin whitepaper.

When Baio rediscovered the concealed Bitcoin whitepaper, he commented on the probability of a “secret Bitcoin maxi working at Apple”, adding:

“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.”

Though these people discovered the concealed PDF, they were not able to unravel the mystery related to the inclusion of the Bitcoin whitepaper into the MacOS.