Earlier this month, it was discovered that Apple had included a copy of the Bitcoin whitepaper in every release of macOS since the 2018 release of macOS Mojave. However, now that's coming to an end. 9to5Mac found that in the most recent beta release of macOS Ventura (13.4 beta 3), the copy of the paper stashed deep in the system file is gone.
It's unclear why the whitepaper, authored by the presumably pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto, ever ended up in shipped versions of macOS in the first place. The document was in a folder within the Image Capture software, including a tool called VirtualScanner.app, which was also removed from the beta. Virtual Scanner II may have been an internal tool for testing scanning without any actual hardware.
Why the Bitcoin whitepaper? It may have been a test document that was never supposed to be seen by the public. Whether it was an in-joke among developers or just an easy file to use will never be known for sure.
If you haven't yet updated, you can still find the document with the following command in Terminal:
open /System/Library/Image\ Capture/Devices/VirtualScanner.app/Contents/Resources/simpledoc.pdf
