Ever notice that macOS takes up a whole lot of storage space? There’s a lot of code in macOS, and apparently, some of it is not what you’d expect, as Andy Baio found out earlier this week. On Baio’s blog, Waxy.com, he wrote about his discovery of Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin whitepaper that is stashed within macOS.
The paper, titled “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,” explains the Bitcoin electronic cash system and was originally published in 2008. The paper has apparently shipped with every copy of macOS since Mojave in 2018. Why? No one really knows. Baio theorizes that it was used as a test document.
Baio notes that “a little bird” told him that the paper could be removed in a future version of macOS. So if you want to see it, here’s how.
Open the Terminal app (it’s in Applications > Utilities) and enter the following:
open /System/Library/Image\ Capture/Devices/VirtualScanner.app/Contents/Resources/simpledoc.pdf
Don’t want to use the Terminal? Do the following:
The gif below shows how to navigate to the whitepaper the long way, by opening the nested folders.
Foundry
While Baio and others have recently discovered this, Joshua Dickens tweeted about it in 2020. Dickens also points out that there’s an image that resembles a Thomas Hawk photo in the same folder as the Bitcoin whitepaper.
The VirtualScanner stuff is just one of the hidden mysteries of macOS. Now if only we can figure out the mysteries of macOS Ventura 13.3…
