Apple/Andrew Cunningham
If you’re on a Mac and want to brush up on the basics of Bitcoin, good news: Blogger Andy Baio has discovered that “every modern copy of macOS” contains a copy of Satoshi Nakomoto’s original Bitcoin white paper tucked away in the macOS system folders and accessible with a simple Terminal command.
Here’s the command you can use to open it on your own Mac:
open /System/Library/Image\ Capture/Devices/VirtualScanner.app/Contents/Resources/simpledoc.pdf
We’ve confirmed the document exists on a fully updated Mac with Ventura 13.3, and Baio says the 184KB PDF file appears to go all the way back to 2018 Mojave (it’s not present in 2017 High Sierra).
The file is contained in a system app called VirtualScanner.app. This is almost certainly related to the “import from iPhone” continuity camera feature, which allows you to insert images or documents “scanned” with your iPhone or iPad’s camera directly into a macOS app. That feature was originally introduced in Mojave, the same macOS version that added the Bitcoin White Paper.
Baio says “a little birdie” told him that the presence of the Bitcoin white paper had been submitted internally to Apple “nearly a year ago” as an issue, and that it had been assigned to “the same engineer who put the PDF there in the first place.” .” It has apparently gone unnoticed since then and the white paper is still there.
The Bitcoin White Paper is not the only classified document included in macOS. For years, the Pages app contained a small “apple.txt” file containing the full text of Apple’s old “here’s to the crazy ones” ad speech, plus former CEO Steve Jobs’ Stanford speech in 2005. The document seems to be no longer included in the current version of Pages.
We’ve reached out to Apple to see if the company has anything to add. In the absence of a response, the easiest explanation is that the bizarre but ultimately innocuous inclusion of the white paper is an Easter egg tucked away by a cryptocurrency enthusiast at Apple, and we expect it to disappear in a future update now that it’s been noticed.
