Apple is known as a disciplined and structured company. However, there is still some mystery surrounding the brand and its products. Many Macs, including perhaps yours, have witnessed this surprising and interesting discovery.
An important finding when repairing a printer
This is a surprising discovery and a remarkable one. Andy Baio described his accidental discovery of the Bitcoin white paper: he came across it while trying to fix his printer.
Virtual Scanner app
This document was the first to explain everything about how this electronic money works. It is located in a series of system subfolders in an application called VirtualScanner.
This discovery is the result of sheer chance. While trying to scan a document with his wireless scanner, Andy Pao saw a tool called “Virtual Scanner II” appear on the screen.
By default, this tool displays Lambda images. But by changing the file type to “document”, a white paper by Satoshi Nakamoto appeared in 2008.
“I discovered that a PDF copy of Satoshi Nakamoto’s white paper has been pushed to every copy of macOS since Mojave in 2018.”
How to find a document?
This document serves as a test document for this project, which is hidden from some people. Its function is not entirely clear. However, it does contain a Bitcoin whitepaper, and all you have to do to find it is type the following command line to bring it up on your Mac:
open/System/Library/Image\Capture/Devices/VirtualScanner.app/Contents/Resources/simpledoc.pdf
This document does not seem to exist in the High Sierra, but it does exist in the Mojave and Ventura. Why he is there remains a mystery.
No one at Apple knows
No other information was included in the document, and the Bitcoin whitepaper does not appear to have been edited. As a reminder, the document published by Satoshi Nakamoto is generally considered the cornerstone of the network and cryptocurrencies.
A user already found it
To date, I have not been able to find any precedent on the Internet. Before him, only one internet user named Joshua Dickens had noticed him. It was 2020, and he shared his discovery on Twitter.
Internal reference without follow-up
This quirk was reported to Apple in a bug report by the engineer who inserted this PDF a year ago. After that, no comments or changes were made.
Bitcoin digs deep into the Web2
Andy Baio quickly checked his friends macOS for a white paper. In fact, it is everywhere. Thus, the roots of Web 3 penetrated deep into Web 2.
Why is this document in this place?
It’s hard to guess what prompted the engineer to embed the precious text in all Apple-branded products. Is it a command, an oversight, or a joke from a crypto enthusiast trainer? Or a PDF document in a better format that tests the machine’s capabilities during development and never finds out? The last hypothesis seems more likely.
A simple test document?
Often, people working on the project used the Bitcoin PDF whitepaper as a test document, but didn’t tell anyone about it. It’s a harmless “easter egg” added by a developer who happens to be a cryptocurrency enthusiast.
The mystery persists
So, the mystery is now unsolved, and the Bitcoin whitepaper can be found in all copies of modern macOS.
It doesn’t matter what led to the Bitcoin whitepaper ending up at the heart of an Apple-branded product. One thing is certain: at a time when the dominance of Web 2 is threatened by the growth of Web 3, tokenism remains strong.
As a world that completely controls our data competes with a world where technology brings freedom, this discovery only sheds light on the obvious. Bitcoin is everywhere and nowhere at once. Elusive, mysterious and wonderful.
