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Bitcoin’s iconic white paper—the document that first revealed the plan for the digital currency—has been saved on every Mac running an operating system from late 2018 on, tech entrepreneur Andy Baio discovered this week.

The file are in the computer: Type "open /System/Library/Image\ Capture/Devices/VirtualScanner.app/Contents/Resources/simpledoc.pdf" into the Terminal app on a Mac, and a PDF of Bitcoin’s white paper will pop up.

Conspiracies are flying around Twitter that Steve Jobs could low-key be the anonymous Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto and this is his way of breadcrumbing the world.

Choose your truth, but Occam’s razor suggests that an unknown crypto-loving Apple engineer coded the PDF into Macs just for funsies (or for testing that was never meant to reach users). It wouldn’t be the first time: The Pages app used to contain a secret text file of Apple’s “Here’s to the crazy ones” ad and the commencement speech Jobs gave at Stanford in 2005.

Finally, “a little bird” told Baio that Bitcoin’s white paper PDF will likely be deleted in a future Apple update.

More details: https://waxy.org/2023/04/the-bitcoin-whitepaper-is-hidden-in-every-modern-copy-of-macos and https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/currencies/apple-bitcoin-manifesto-steve-jobs-satoshi-nakamoto-white-paper-cryptocurrency-2023-4?_gl=1*7moxw5*_ga*NjM2MzQ3NjcyLjE2NDUxOTIzMTA.*_ga_E21CV80ZCZ*MTY4MDg4NDQ3OS4xOTMuMS4xNjgwODg1MTUxLjU2LjAuMA