There is a Bitcoin white paper on Mac OS, why? |coindesk JAPAN

It seems that someone has slipped the Bitcoin whitepaper into MacOS shipped since 2017.

In April 2021, MacOS community forum user bernd178 noticed that there was a feature called “Virtual Scanner II” in “Image Capture Utility” that wasn’t enabled by default.

Inside the Virtual Scanner II was an image of the San Francisco Bay and a PDF of the Bitcoin whitepaper.

“Bizarrely, in VirtualScanner I also found a Bitcoin whitepaper PDF by Satoshi Nakamoto” (bernd178)

This fact was recently discovered by blogger Andy Baio and posted on his blog.

“Of all the documents in the world, why was the Bitcoin whitepaper chosen? Is there a secret Bitcoin supremacist at Apple? Filename ‘simpledoc.pdf’, It’s only 184KB,” Baio wrote on his blog.

“Maybe it’s just a quick, light, multi-page PDF for testing that we didn’t expect end users to see.”

Not sure why this PDF is included in MacOS. Many will be checking to see if it’s included in MacOS 14, due out later this year.

It will also be interesting to see if Apple takes note of this issue and removes this PDF in a regularly distributed patch.

Apple has not yet responded to a request for comment.

｜Translation: coindesk JAPAN
｜Editing: Takayuki Masuda
｜Image: Shutterstock
｜ Original: Hidden Inside MacOS, the Bitcoin Whitepaper