White Paper Bitcoin Removed From Apple Computers Following Late Discovery

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A digital copy of the original Bitcoin white paper that had been hidden on Macintosh computers for more than five years is not part of an upcoming update to Apple’s operating system, AppleInsider reported Tuesday.

The belated discovery of the PDF document went viral three weeks ago, and it was just the latest in a long line of Easter eggs that Apple (or its employees, more likely) have planted over the past few decades. . It seems to have gone unnoticed by millions of Apple users until 2020, when designer Joshua Dickens tweeted about it. Someone who read his post started a thread in Apple’s support forums in April 2021.

However, it didn’t get much more attention until famed technologist Andy Baio talked about it last month.

“Of all the documents in the world, why was the Bitcoin white paper chosen? Is there a big bitcoin secret that works at Apple? Baio asked. “Maybe it was just a handy, lightweight multi-page PDF for testing purposes, never meant to be seen by end users.”

The discovery even prompted Craig Wright, who has long claimed to be pseudonymous bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto, to suggest that Apple was infringing on his copyright. Wright previously obtained a court order to force the Bitcoin.org website to remove a copy of the document in 2021, but the website refused to comply.

According to participants in Apple’s beta software program, the upcoming MacOS Ventura 13.4 release will not contain the file, or the other items it was originally bundled with, a test driver for a virtual scanner allowing developers to work with the operating system image capture module. The files were never meant to be discovered by average users, located in hidden system files.

Next to the Bitcoin PDF whitepaper was a photo of a sign on Treasure Island in San Francisco.

Baio later said a source inside Apple told him that the paper’s presence was filed as a developer job ticket last year and was attributed to the same person who originally placed the white paper in the system. At the time, however, the ticket had not been acted upon.

“They indicated that it will likely be removed in future releases,” Baio said.

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