By
Steve Muchoki
April 19th, 2024
It remains unknown what purpose Nakamoto’s whitepaper serves in these products.
The original Bitcoin whitepaper has just been discovered hidden in Apple’s system files. Apparently, the whitepaper can be seen in every Apple machine that runs on the macOS Catalina or newer versions of the operating system. This is according to a recent discovery that was made by a technologist simply identified as Andy Baio.
Location of Bitcoin Whitepaper on Apple macOS Revealed
Revealing what he found in a Wednesday blog post, Baio claims that the file – named “simpledoc.pdf,” spells out Satoshi Nakamoto’s entire vision for decentralized finance. He also implied via the post that a PDF copy of the Bitcoin white paper went with every copy of macOS that shipped since Mojave in 2018.
Per his account, he did not set out to find the Bitcoin whitepaper. Rather, he stumbled on the discovery while trying to fix his printer. Part of his statement reads:
“I was trying to scan a document with my wireless printer/scanner, but the device wasn’t showing up in Image Capture after I upgraded macOS recently. Just this “Virtual Scanner II” device that I’d never seen (or noticed?) before.”
As it turns out, the Virtual Scanner II is Nakamoto’s whitepaper. And it took Baio changing the media type from “Photo” to “Document” to realize this.
Baio has confirmed that the file can be found on “every version of macOS from Mojave (10.14.0) to the newest version (Ventura). However, it remains unknown what purpose Nakamoto’s whitepaper serves in these products. For what it’s worth, however, Baio and many others believe that the file may not have been intended for end users to see. That is, it could have just been for testing purposes.
While Apple is yet to respond to the new reports, it should be noted that the firm has a budding relationship with the crypto and blockchain industry. Towards the end of 2022, the tech giant added support for NFT trading via its App Store. At the time, Apple stated the move was to allow app developers to sell NFTs in-app and new apps to install tokens within them. But the firm had a condition attached to the arrangement that will see it ensure gains as well. Apple takes a 30% cut from App developers who are able to rake in over $1 million from its store. But takes 15% from developers with lesser revenue.