It turns out that since 2017, someone has been concealing a copy of the Bitcoin white paper within every shipment of macOS. This news had a great impact on the cryptocurrency community.
Bitcoin White Paper Found Hidden Inside macOS
A function dubbed Virtual Scanner II, which is concealed inside the Image Capture Tool but isn’t turned on by default, was first discovered in April 2021 by a user by the name of Bernd178 from the MacOS Community Forum. A nondescript photo of a bay in San Francisco and a PDF copy of the Bitcoin white paper were both tucked away within the Virtual Scanner II.
“Weirdly, there is also a PDF with the original Bitcoin white paper from Satoshi Nakamoto in the VirtualScanner.app Package Content,”
bernd178
Blogger Andy Baio recently rediscovered this and wrote about it on his blog Waxy. According to Baio, you can access a copy of the white paper by using the terminal software and the following commands: open/System/Library/Image\Capture/Devices/VirtualScanner.app/Contents/Resources/simpledoc.pdf
“Of all the documents in the world, why was the Bitcoin white paper chosen? Is there a secret Bitcoin maxi working at Apple? The filename is “simpledoc.pdf” and it’s only 184 KB. Maybe it was just a convenient, lightweight multipage PDF for testing purposes, never meant to be seen by end users.”
Andy Baio
About Lawsuits Filed by Craig Wright
There’s another point to consider. Craig Wright has been suing the websites that contain the Bitcoin white paper in an attempt to copyright it. However, Wright lost a copyright lawsuit relating to the white paper in a U.K. court in February 2023.
“I do not see any prospect of the law as currently stated and understood in the case law allowing copyright protection of subject matter which is not expressed or fixed anywhere. It remains the case that no relevant ‘work’ has been identified containing content which defines the structure of the Bitcoin File Format.”
Judge James Mellor
While many will be looking to see if it is in MacOS 14, which is anticipated to ship later this year, the reason this file was added is likely to remain a mystery.
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