Every current release of Apple’s Mac operating system appears to contain a copy of Satoshi Nakamoto’s initial white paper outlining the Bitcoin $28,083 network.
According to a blog post by techie Andy Baio dated April 5 that said “apparently shipped with every copy of macOS since Mojave in 2018,” a PDF of the Bitcoin white paper is available for download.
In an interview with Cointelegraph, Baio said that he had been “just trying to fix my printer” and scanning a paper with a wireless scanner when a “Virtual Scanner II” gadget that he had “never seen before” suddenly emerged.
When Baio adjusted the media type from “Photo” to “Document,” Nakamoto’s white paper emerged in Virtual Scanner II instead of the photo that was shown by default.
“I wasn’t looking for the paper for Bitcoin!” Baio shouted. I was only attempting to repair my printer.
There is “virtually nothing about this online,” according to Baio’s post. To help Baio locate the file, he sent a November 2020 Twitter discussion from designer Joshua Dickens, who also discovered the whitepaper.
To make it simple for others to access the whitepaper, Baio designed a prompt for usage in the macOS command line interface, Terminal. He said, “I began asking other Mac-using pals whether they could confirm it, and every one of them could.
On each of the three Apple Mac computers that Cointelegraph tested, the prompt successfully launched the Bitcoin white paper.
The file may be discovered on “every version of macOS from Mojave (10.14.0) to the current version (Ventura), but not in High Sierra (10.13) or earlier,” according to Baio’s blog post.
It is uncertain why contemporary versions of macOS include Nakamoto’s white paper. It was “just a convenient, lightweight multipage PDF for testing purposes, never meant to be seen by end users,” according to Baio’s essay.
