Tech blogger Andy Baio recently made a mysterious discovery while trying to fix his printer: Satoshi Nakamoto's 2008 Bitcoin white paper. In a blog post at Waxy.org, Baio writes that it appears as though the paper has been hidden as a PDF in "every copy of macOS since Mojave in 2018." Quartz reports that it's been distributed since 2017, but confirmed its location and presence on the machine—as did everyone Baio asked to check and see if it was on their Mac. Newser was also able to confirm the paper's presence on a 2020 MacBook Air. Baio writes that the white paper appears to have a purpose as "a sample document for a device called 'Virtual Scanner II."
Mac owners curious about finding the document can follow these steps:
- Open Finder, go to Applications, then Utilities, and open the Terminal app
- Once in the Terminal app, copy and past the following command:
- open /System/Library/Image\ Capture/Devices/VirtualScanner.app/Contents/Resources/simpledoc.pdf
Theories about the paper's presence include the possibility an Apple engineer is a Bitcoin enthusiast promoting decentralized finance or, more simply, that it was intended for testing use and not meant for public consumption. As Quartz and Baio both note, Apple—which did not comment on the find—has hidden other things inside its systems, including text from speeches given by late co-founder Steve Jobs and a photo made on an island in San Francisco Bay. (More Apple stories.)
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