Apple CEO Tim Cook attends an Apple store in Shanghai / Thomson Reuters
Apple has hidden a bitcoin manifesto in every Mac since 2018, says a tech blogger who discovered it by accident
Phil Rosen Apr 6, 2023, 8:29 AM
Apple CEO Tim Cook attends an Apple store in Shanghai Thomson Reuters
- Technologist Andy Baio wrote in an April 5 blog post that he found a PDF of the original bitcoin white paper on his Macbook.
- He said Apple has seemingly hid the original crypto manifesto in “every copy of macOS since Mojave in 2018.”
- Baio shared how any users could locate the manifesto on their own Apple computers.
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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 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 fellow Mac users to confirm, and the document was there for every single 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 out Baio’s instructions and found a copy of the document stored on the computer running the most recent update of macOS.
The now-famous white paper, titled “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System”, was published in October, 2008 by the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto. In it, the author lays out their thesis for the underlying mechanisms that power what is now the world’s largest cryptocurrency by market value. The paper’s abstract reads:
“A purely 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 barely any other evidence online save for a lone Twitter thread from November 2020, with a user posting similar screenshots.
Baio couldn’t figure out why, of all documents, the original bitcoin manifesto was chosen to be included in Apple’s operating system.
“Maybe,” he wrote, “it was just a convenient, lightweight multipage PDF for testing purposes, never meant to be seen by end users.”
As for token itself, bitcoin is hovering around $27,925 on Thursday, and has rallied 68% so far in 2023. The crypto has seen nearly 24% of those gains come in March amid broader banking turmoil and uncertainty.
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