Apparently, Apple has secretly included the complete whitepaper of Bitcoin, the most famous, and important, cryptocurrency in the world, within every version of its macOS operating system since Mojave (2018). We don't know why the American company decided to include the file in the OS of its Mac computers, but we can make some hypotheses about it.
The discovery was made by Andy Baio of Waxy , who identified the PDF file with the article “ Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System ”, written by the enigmatic Satoshi Nakamoto , while he was solving a problem with the printer. Rather interesting is the fact that the file is used by the “ Virtual Scanner II ” service, linked to the import of documents from iPhones and iPads.
In case you are interested in verifying for yourself, provided you have a MacBook , MacMini, iMac or any other Mac computer running a version of macOS from Mojave on, here's the procedure:
Open Terminal Type “open /System/Library/Image\ Capture/Devices/VirtualScanner.app/Contents/Resources/simpledoc.pdf” without the quotes Press Enter At this point, the whitepaper should open immediately. --> According to a source Baio spoke to, the presence of the Bitcoin whitepaper within macOS is already known to Apple, but it is an issue not yet addressed by the OS development team.
Photo Credit: Apple/Andy Baio --> It's not the first time that users have discovered "useless" files within macOS. The communities of fans of the Apple world had in fact already talked about it online since 2020. For example, a high-resolution JPEG photo of a sign was found, depicting a scene from Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay. The presence of these "useless" files within macOS has raised several questions and speculations among users and fans. Some believe that these files may have been inserted by mistake, while others think they could be a sort of easter egg, i.e. small hidden contents inserted by the developers as a surprise for the most curious users.