Satoshi Nakamoto, the anonymous founder of Bitcoin, released the Bitcoin white paper in 2008. Illustration by Fortune
On every Mac operating system post 2018, a nine-page PDF is hidden inside a nest of folders. That PDF is none other than the Bitcoin white paper, the famed theoretical outline of the cryptocurrency authored by Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin’s anonymous inventor.
On Wednesday, Andy Baio, former CTO of Kickstarter, was the first to publicly announce that he had found the squirreled-away PDF after he tried to connect a combination printer-scanner to his MacBook.
“I’ve asked over a dozen Mac-using friends to confirm, and it was there for every one of them,” he wrote on his more than two decades old blog. He thinks the white paper’s inclusion was the work of a single engineer, rather than an Easter egg ordained from on high.
While Baio has been a techie for decades, it’s relatively simple to find the same document on your very own Mac. Here’s how:
Using Terminal
Every iteration of the Mac operating system has what’s called Terminal, or a way to explore a computer’s file system through text commands. To access Terminal on your Mac, simply go to the Applications folder, then open the Utilities folder, and click on it.
Baio wrote a simple command for Mac users to reveal the hidden Bitcoin white paper. Copy and paste the following code into Terminal once it’s open:
open /System/Library/Image Capture/Devices/VirtualScanner.app/Contents/Resources/simpledoc.pdfUsing Finder
The more time-intensive approach—but one with a technologically lower bar—is to navigate through Finder, a Mac’s file management system.
Open a Finder window, navigate to the System folder, and prepare yourself for a deluge of clicks.
From Systems, go to Library, Image Capture, and then Devices. Once in Devices, right click on VirtualScanner and choose Show Package Contents. That should open up another folder titled Contents, through which you should navigate to Resources, which will reveal a number of files.
Click on simpledoc.pdf, and voilà! You should finally have arrived at your destination: the nine-page outline that detailed the theoretical specifications of Bitcoin, a piece of digital dust that, in aggregate, is worth well over $500 billion as of Friday afternoon.
