How to find the Bitcoin white paper hidden on your Mac
Satoshi Nakamoto, the anonymous founder of Bitcoin, released the Bitcoin White Paper in 2008. Illustration of Fortune
On every Mac operating system after 2018, a nine-page PDF is hidden inside a nest of folders. That PDF is none other than the Bitcoin White Paper, the famous theoretical overview of the cryptocurrency written by Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin’s anonymous inventor.
On Wednesday, Andy Baio, former CTO of Kickstarter, was the first to publicly announce that he had found the missing PDF after trying to connect a combination printer-scanner to his MacBook.
“I’ve asked over a dozen Mac-using friends to verify and it was there for every one of them,” he wrote on his more than two-decade-old blog. He believes the White Paper’s inclusion was the work of a single engineer, rather than an Easter egg ordained from on high.
While Baio has been a technician for decades, it’s relatively easy to find the same document on your own Mac. This is how:
Using terminal
Every iteration of the Mac operating system has what’s called a Terminal, or a way to explore a computer’s file system through text commands. To access Terminal on your Mac, simply go to the Applications folder, then open the Utilities folder and click on it.
Baio wrote a simple command for Mac users to reveal the hidden Bitcoin whitepaper. Copy and paste the following code into Terminal when it’s open:
open /System/Library/Image Capture/Devices/VirtualScanner.app/Contents/Resources/simpledoc.pdfUsing Finder
The more time-consuming approach—but one with a technologically lower bar—is to navigate through the Finder, a Mac’s file management system.
Open a Finder window, navigate to the System folder, and prepare for a deluge of clicks.
From Systems, go to Library, Capture and then Devices. Once in Devices, right-click VirtualScanner and select Show Package Contents. That should open up another folder titled Contents, which you should navigate to Resources through, which will reveal a number of files.
Click on simpledoc.pdf, and voila! You should have finally arrived at your destination: the nine-page overview that described the theoretical specifications of Bitcoin, a piece of digital dust worth more than $500 billion in total as of Friday afternoon.
