There’s a secret bitcoin file hiding in your MacBook—here’s how to find it
Many MacBook owners take comfort in the fact that Apple products come with some pretty robust security protections to prevent unwanted files from entering their laptop, but there’s one hidden document about bitcoin lurking in computer folders that not even Apple tells you About.
It turns out that hiding in the system files of MacBooks is a blueprint or research paper on the creation of the cryptocurrency, written by its pseudonymous and rumored founder Satoshi Nakamoto.
Entitled ‘Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System’, the paper’s abstract notes that a “purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow electronic payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution”.
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It continues: “Digital signatures provide part of the solution, but the most important benefits are lost if a trusted third party is still required to prevent double spending. We propose a solution to the double-spending problem by using a peer-to-peer network.”
Ironically, for a nine-page article containing such a complex idea, the file on your MacBook is actually titled ‘simpledoc’.
How to find the hidden bitcoin paper?
- First of all, go to the Finder – it’s the app with a blue and white smiley face icon.
- Once there, find a way to get to the Macintosh HD display. One way to do this is to go to “Go” in the navigation bar at the top of the screen and select “Computer”.
- After that, you will click on System, then Library, then Image Capture, and finally, Devices.
- Once there, you will see a VirtualScanner file. Don’t click on it (it did nothing for us), but right-click instead to open the options view. There you will click “show package contents”.
- Then click on the content folder, then Resources, and there you are.
As well as containing the bitcoin paper, this folder also contains more unusual files, including blank image files titled ‘bed2’, ‘edge2’ and ‘top2’, as well as an image of a blue wooden door with the number six on it, and a sign that warns that an alarm system is in place.
There is also another image file, titled ‘grid’, which contains an 8×6 grid of numbers 1 to 48, if you are looking for a fun way to waste your time, or play an incomplete game of Snakes and Ladders.
Similarly, it is a four-page PDF document where each page contains a large number indicating the page number. It is very strange.
This bizarre Easter egg — if you can call it that — was shared by tech blogger Andy Baio on Wednesday, and before that, only a handful of other people have seen it.
As for why it’s even there in the first place, Baio writes in a blog post: A little bird tells me that someone internally filed it as an issue almost a year ago, assigned to the same engineer who put the PDF there in the first place , and that person has not taken action or commented on the matter since.”
Well, now you know. You’re welcome.
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