For some reason, the white paper that first proposed Bitcoin has been included in every version of macOS since Mojave.
Why this document has been on every Mac released in the past five years is a mystery.
macOS isn’t advertising Bitcoin
Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System by Satoshi Nakamoto first appeared online in 2008. “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,” is how the proposal begins. Bitcoin itself launched in 2009.
While a seminal work in the creation of cryptocurrency, there’s no apparent reason why the document should be part of macOS for years.
But Andy Baio used his blog Waxy to say, “While trying to fix my printer today, I discovered that a PDF copy of Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin whitepaper apparently shipped with every copy of macOS since Mojave in 2018.”
It’s not like this is a way for Apple to advertise Bitcoin. It took five years for anyone to notice the file — that’s very poor advertising. If the goal truly was to point users toward a type of cryptocurrency, they needed to be much more blatant about it.
Baio has no explanation other than to suggest “maybe it was just a convenient, lightweight multipage PDF for testing purposes, never meant to be seen by end users.”
To find the file on your own Mac, Baio says that all that’s necessary is to open a Terminal and type:
open /System/Library/Image\
Capture/Devices/VirtualScanner.app/Contents/Resources/simpledoc.pdf
