If you've used a Mac with macOS Mojave or later installed you've probably also used a Mac with the Bitcoin whitepaper on it as well.
That doesn't mean that you or the Mac's owner is a Bitcoin truther, though. It seems that Macs have had the whitepaper hidden on their SSD since 2018 and nobody seems to really know why that might be.
But it's definitely there. We've checked. And now you can as well.
Taking your Mac to the moon
The whole strange situation was reported by Andy Baio over at waxy.org where the developer reports trying to fix a printer issue before finding a PDF copy of Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin whitepaper infamous whitepaper.
Nobody knows who Nakamoto is, nor do we know who put the whitepaper there. But it seems to have been used as a test document for a device called Virtual Scanner II in the Image Capture app.
Want to take a look for yourself? Because you can.
To test the theory for yourself, open a Terminal window and enter the following without the scare quotes — "open /System/Library/Image\ Capture/Devices/VirtualScanner.app/Contents/Resources/simpledoc.pdf" and press Return.
When you do, Preview should open the PDF ready for your perusal.
Now, you don't need to be rocking any of Apple's latest and best Macs for this to work. Baioi says they found the file on Macs going back to 2018's macOS Mojave, so this isn't a macOS Ventura thing. Not by a long shot.
As for what's going on, nobody knows. But this isn't the first time the whitepaper has been spotted — it was also reported in an Apple Community post two years ago.
Amazingly, Baio says that "a little bird tells me that someone internally filed it as an issue nearly a year ago, assigned to the same engineer who put the PDF there in the first place, and that person hasn’t taken action or commented on the issue since."
Amazing.
