- 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 that Apple apparently hid the original cryptographic manifest in "every copy of macOS since Mojave in 2018."
- Baio shared how users can locate the manifest on their own Apple computers.
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 book Bitcoin White Paper apparently shipped with every copy of macOS since Mojave in 2018," Baio wrote in an April 5 blog post.
He said he asked more than a dozen of his friends and fellow Mac users to confirm, and the document was there for every one of them, the file called "simpledoc.pdf."
To find it, per 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 tried Baio's instructions and found a copy of the document stored on the computer running the latest macOS update.
The now famous white paper, titled "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System," was published in October 2008 by the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. In it, the author expounds his thesis on the underlying mechanisms that drive what is now the world's largest cryptocurrency by market value. The abstract of the article says:
"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 hardly any other evidence online, save for a single Twitter thread from November 2020, with a user posting similar screenshots.
โJosh D (@schwa23) November 28, 2020
Baio was unable to understand why, out of all the documents, the original bitcoin manifest was chosen to be included in Apple's operating system.
"Maybe," he wrote, "it was just a convenient, lightweight multi-page PDF for testing purposes, never intended to be seen by end users."
As for the token itself, bitcoins It hovers around $27,925 on Thursday and is up 68% so far in 2023. The crypto has seen nearly 24% of those gains in March amid increased banking turmoil and uncertainty.
