Hidden Inside MacOS, the Bitcoin Whitepaper

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Someone hid the Bitcoin whitepaper in every copy of macOS shipped since 2017.

In April 2021, a user by the name of bernd178 on the MacOS Community Forum noticed that buried in the image capture utility is a feature called Virtual Scanner II, which isn’t enabled by default.

Hidden within Virtual Scanner II is a nondescript image of a San Francisco bay and a PDF copy of the Bitcoin whitepaper.

Oddly enough, there is also a PDF with Satoshi Nakamoto’s original Bitcoin whitepaper in the contents of the VirtualScanner.app package, bernd178 wrote.

I find it hard to believe anyone cares, added a user named Barney-15E, in response to bernd178’s post.

Recently, this was rediscovered by blogger Andy Baio and posted on his Waxy blog. Baio noted that you can open a copy of the whitepaper by entering the following commands in the terminal application:

Of all the documents in the world, why was the Bitcoin white paper chosen? Is there a secret Bitcoin maxi working at Apple? The file name is simpledoc.pdf and its only 184KB, writes Baio on Waxy. Maybe it was just a handy, lightweight multi-page PDF for testing purposes, never meant to be seen by end users.

There is also another angle worth noting. Craig Wright attempted to copyright the Bitcoin whitepaper and unsuccessfully sued the venues that host it. This may be an act of internal defiance by a coder working at Apple, a company too big for Wright to sue.

I see no prospect of the law as it is currently set forth and understood in the case law permitting copyright protection of subject matter which is nowhere expressed or fixed, Judge James Mellor told the time in a decision of the High Court of England and Wales. . However, no relevant “work” has been identified that contains content that defines the structure of the Bitcoin file format.

Why this PDF was included will likely be a mystery, though many will check to see if it’s in macOS 14, which is due to launch later this year.

It will also be interesting to see if Apple takes notice and removes it through its regular cadence of patches sent out to macOS users.

Apple did not respond to a request for comment from CoinDesk before press time.

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