Every copy of macOS that has shipped since 2018 has contained the original whitepaper detailing how Bitcoin works.
The bizarre discovery was made by developer Andy Baio, who was trying to fix a problem with his printer. He discovered that in the Image Capture utility that’s built into macOS, there’s a folder containing sample documents. One of those is the PDF of the Bitcoin whitepaper written by Satoshi Nakamoto, the Bitcoin inventor whose true identity remains a mystery.
How to find the Bitcoin whitepaper on your Mac
There are a couple of ways to locate the Bitcoin whitepaper. The least technical way is to open Finder and navigate to the following folders:
Macintosh HD > System > Library > Image Capture > Devices.
Once you reach the Devices folder, hold down Control on your keyboard and click VirtualScanner and Show Package Contents. Open the Contents and Resources folders and in there should be a document called simpledoc.pdf. That is the Bitcoin whitepaper, as shown below on my MacBook Pro.
The Bitcoin whitepaper stored on a Mac
Barry Collins
What’s it doing there?
There’s no clear explanation of why the document is shipped with macOS. On his blog, Andy Baio claims that “a little bird tells me that someone internally filed it [the Bitcoin whitepaper] as an issue nearly a year ago, assigned to the same engineer who put the PDF there in the first place, and that person hasn’t taken action or commented on the issue since.”
It’s likely that the document was a so-called Easter Egg, planted on the Mac to serve a practical purpose as a sample document as well an intriguing find that somebody would inevitably stumble across one day. The Bitcoin whitepaper’s inclusion in macOS is even more curious given that Apple has always been relatively cool on the idea of supporting cryptocurrencies.
But if Apple wanted to kickstart conspiracy theories that Bitcoin is somehow linked to the company, it’s going the right way about it…
