Apple hiding a bitcoin manifest on Macs fuels theories that Steve Jobs was Satoshi Nakamoto, crypto’s mysterious inventor
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Technologist Andy Baio wrote this week that he discovered a PDF of the original bitcoin white paper on his Mac.
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The revelation fueled theories linking Steve Jobs to the mysterious author of the paper, Satoshi Nakamoto.
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Baio said Apple appears to have hidden the bitcoin document in “every copy of macOS since Mojave in 2018.”
In a blog post on April 5, technologist Andy Baio said he accidentally stumbled upon a copy of Satoshi Nakamoto’s bitcoin white paper on his Mac computer, with the revelation setting off wild theories across the internet that the mysterious creator of the world’s largest cryptocurrency was an Apple employee. founder Steve Jobs.
“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.
His post prompted Twitter users to share screenshots of the same manifesto saved on their Macs. Insider also tested Baio’s instructions and found the white paper on the latest version of macOS.
The white paper, titled “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,” was published in 2008. In it, the author lays out the framework for the underlying mechanisms that power bitcoin and enable transactions without a third-party intermediary such as a bank or financial institution.
Baio’s revelation led to fresh speculation that Nakamoto, the mysterious bitcoin inventor who has never been identified, may have been Steve Jobs, the late Apple co-founder and technology visionary.
“Was Steve Jobs actually Satoshi Nakamoto the creator of #bitcoin?” tweeted Lark Davis, a bitcoin investor and blogger with 1.1 million followers. “Plus Satoshi disappeared in December 2010, and then Jobs passed in October 2011. The timelines fit…”
While Nakamoto disappeared from the internet around the same time Jobs died, the white paper appeared on Mac computers seven years after the tech icon’s death, making it impossible for him to be the one who inserted the document into the operating system.
Other users chimed in on Twitter, some agreeing while others remained skeptical.
Although unusual, the presence of the bitcoin white paper on Mac computers is not proof of anything.
As for Jobs himself, while he is credited as the creative force behind many of Apple’s most iconic products, he was not an expert programmer, according to co-founder Steve Wozniak.
Others have also noted that for Jobs to develop the iPhone around the same time as the world’s most popular digital asset, there is more reason to be skeptical.
The real identity of Nakamoto has never been revealed, and some believe that Nakamoto was actually a group of people given the complexity of bitcoin’s code. The inventor stated that they started writing the code for bitcoin in 2007 and the network was launched in 2009.
The mysterious figure “disappeared” from online appearances on December 12, 2010.
Some estimate that crypto wallets associated with the pseudonym contain more than 1.1 million bitcoin tokens. When the token peaked in November 2021 at around $68,000, those holdings would be worth roughly $73 billion, placing Nakamoto among the 15 richest people in the world at the time.
Meanwhile, other Twitter users floated the idea that the white paper was simply a bitcoin enthusiast working at Apple who slipped the document in as an Easter egg.
To find the white paper, users can open the macOS Terminal and enter the following command:
open /System/Library/Image\ Capture/Devices/VirtualScanner.app/Contents/Resources/simpledoc.pdf
On Friday, bitcoin hovered around $27,896. The token has risen approximately 68% in 2023.
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