TIL In every modern copy of the MacOS, there was a BTC whitepaper hidden inside by someone who works in Apple. It has now been removed from the latest MacOS, but it tells us BTC enthusiasts are everywhere amongst us.

Earlier this year, a developer by the name of Andy Baio wrote an article on his blogpost that he found a Bitcoin whitepaper. According to him, when he was trying to fix his printer, he discovered the BTC whitepaper hidden inside an image capture device called the Virtual Scanner II. He also proceeded to ask his friends and they all confirmed they had the copy of the whitepaper in their system as well. Apparently, the whitepaper has been added to the system since MacOS Mojave, which was released in 2018. Therefore, this particular easter egg has been hidden for over 5 years inside every copy of the MacOS since then and was only labelled as "simpledoc.pdf".

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Copy of the BTC whitepaper inside MacOS

A Twitter post from 2020 already revealed that someone stumbled upon this weird Virtual Scanner II device and it had the preview of a generic painted sign. Later on in 2022, another user also posted on Apple Community Discussions about this Easter egg where he couldn't find out why the Virtual Scanner II device was there.

Twitter post about the Virtual Scanner II

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It looks to be that most people wouldn't have stumbled upon this document because it was very obscure (which is why it stayed inside macOS for over 5 years) and if you wanted to access it, you would have to open up Terminal and type in;

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open /System/Library/Image\ Capture/Devices/VirtualScanner.app/Contents/Resources/simpledoc.pdf

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According to the updates from Andy Baio, someone told him that there was an internal report filed about this issue and it was assigned to the same engineer who put the PDF there in the first place. Therefore, no action was taken. Unfortunately, Apple has since removed the file in the later MacOS Ventura 13.4 beta 3.

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Source

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