Apple has hidden a Bitcoin manifest in every Mac since 2018: Tech Blogger
- Technologist Andy Baio wrote in a blog post on April 5 that he found a PDF of the original bitcoin white paper on his Macbook.
- He said Apple has apparently hidden the original crypto manifest in “every copy of macOS since Mojave in 2018.”
- Baio shared how all users could find the manifesto on their own Apple computers.
Technologist Andy Baio says he accidentally discovered a copy of Satoshi Nakamoto’s bitcoin white paper on his Apple Mac computer.
“While trying to fix my printer today, I discovered that a PDF copy of Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin Whitepaper was apparently shipped with every copy of macOS since Mojave in 2018,” Baio wrote in an April 5 blog post.
He said he asked over a dozen of his friends and other Mac users to verify, and the document was there for each one, the file called “simpledoc.pdf.”
To find it, according to Baio’s instructions, users can open the terminal and type the following command:
open /System/Library/Image\ Capture/Devices/VirtualScanner.app/Contents/Resources/simpledoc.pdf
For those using macOS 10.14 or later, the document should immediately open in Preview as a PDF file, he explained.
Insider tested Baio’s instructions and found a copy of the document stored on the computer running the latest update of macOS.
The now famous white paper, entitled “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System”, was published in October 2008 by the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto. In it, the author lays out his thesis for the underlying mechanisms that drive what is now the world’s largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization. The newspaper’s summary reads:
“A pure peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.”
Baio added that he found little other evidence online except for a lone Twitter thread from November 2020, with a user posting similar screenshots.
Baio could not determine why, of all documents, the original bitcoin manifesto was chosen to be included in Apple’s operating system.
“Perhaps,” he wrote, “it was just a convenient, lightweight multi-page PDF for testing purposes, never meant to be seen by end users.”
As for the token itself, bitcoin is hovering around $27,925 as of Thursday, and is up 68% so far in 2023. The crypto has seen nearly 24% of those gains in March amid greater banking turmoil and uncertainty.
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